Saint Odd

  No bodachs capered among the crowd. None slithered under the benches on which couples shared moments of affection.

  Neither circling the town square nor cruising any of the other streets before this had I received the slightest psychic impression that one day the town would be submerged, a community of drowned and drifting cadavers. Indeed, if Pico Mundo were inundated because of the collapse of Malo Suerte Dam, the town would not stand underwater in precisely the same condition as now, which is how it had appeared in the dream; the rushing waters would do great damage, tumbling cars along the streets, uprooting trees, ripping down awnings, smashing windows.… No rational scenario allowed for the lights to remain aglow in the aftermath of such a disaster, as they had been when I had floated through my nightmare.

  Brooding about that, I circled Memorial Park a second time and saw an enormous banner that I had somehow overlooked before. It was strung across an intersection: big red and black letters on a white background, announcing the annual spring fair at the Maravilla County Fairgrounds, currently under way. Fun for the whole family. The lowest of three lines on the banner declared FEATURING THE WORLD-FAMOUS SOMBRA BROTHERS MIDWAY SHOWS.

  The carnival was back in town.

  Sombra Brothers Midway Shows had occupied the fairground six years earlier, when Stormy and I found the fortune-telling machine in an arcade tent.

  You might think it was a coincidence that I should return to Pico Mundo in expectation of the fulfillment of the fortune-teller’s prediction just when the Sombra Brothers returned as well. So very much about our strange and deeply layered world remained mysterious to me, but my experiences had taught me, among other things, that there were no coincidences.

  Seventeen

  At ticket booth number four, the cashier was a plump woman with long ringlets of auburn hair. The carnival had a jackpot drawing to entice people to stay later and spend more. When she took my money and gave me an admission ticket, she said, “Honey, be sure you stay for the big drawin’ at eleven-forty-five. Three nights, the winners didn’t hang around to collect, so now it’s up to twenty-two thousand dollars. Got to be here to win. Hang on to your ticket. You’re the one tonight, honey.” She had such a beatific smile that her sales pitch seemed like a sincere prediction.

  My intuition—which is seldom wrong—insisted the carnival held secrets that, if revealed, would help me to discover the meaning of my nightmare and the nature of the threat hanging over Pico Mundo. Carnies are a tightly knit community and generally more law-abiding than the rest of us. But there was no reason to dismiss the notion that a few cultists might have made their home in the Sombra Brothers operation, perhaps without other carnies being aware of their demonic nature and their keen interest in terrorism.

  The first thing I did after paying admission and entering the fairground was to head for the southern perimeter of the midway, where in the past there had been a long row of specialty tents, including games (not of the arcade kind) and novelty services. The offerings along that flank of the concourse were pretty much as they had been in past years, among them: Bingo Palace; Quarter Toss; an air-rifle shooting gallery; Wearable Art, where an artist with an airbrush would paint any image you wanted on a T-shirt; Face It, where you could have your face decorated with water-soluble paints in an almost infinite variety of ways.

  Although I had not intended to go anywhere incognito, I had changed my mind about that when it came to the carnival. If possible, I preferred to prowl the midway without being recognized. I had not lived in Pico Mundo for the past eleven months, but I had known a lot of people there. Furthermore, after the events at Green Moon Mall almost two years earlier, photos of me had been in the newspapers; therefore, I might be recognized by many people whom I didn’t know.

  Some of them would tell me that I was a hero, which would be embarrassing. I’d never felt like any kind of hero, considering that, even with my intervention, nineteen people had died that day. Almost as disturbing, some of those who recognized me might be the cultists who currently wanted to kill me.

  The front of the Face It tent was entirely open. On the interior hung blown-up photos of previous customers whose faces had served as canvases for the artists who owned this little concession.

  I wondered what their true faces had looked like before they had been painted. Of course, a fresh-scrubbed face may be a lie, and the truth may be a darkness behind it.

  An attractive dark-haired woman in her early forties sat on a chair beside a table on which were arranged different brushes, as well as bottles of paint and Ziploc bags of glitter in a wide variety of colors. She applied a brush and a small sponge to the face of a teenage girl who sat before her on another chair, working upward from the chin, already at the forehead, creating a floral scene, so that the girl appeared to be peering out at the world through a bouquet of wildflowers; or perhaps she was meant to be a meadow nymph with a face composed of flowers. A second teen, friend of the seated girl, stood watch, already given a leopard’s visage, her face a rich golden orange with black spots and realistically rendered cat whiskers.

  A second artist also worked in the tent. Currently not engaged, she smiled and raised her eyebrows quizzically and with a gesture invited me to the chair in front of her. Judging by appearance, this painter could be the daughter of the other. Attractive, with black hair and celadon eyes, she was unmistakably the dead woman from my dream, the first corpse that had drifted past me through the drowned streets of Pico Mundo.

  When I sat in the chair, she said, “How do you want to look?”

  “Different,” I said. “Very different.”

  She considered me in silence for a moment and then said, “I can do all the faces you see on the walls here and almost anything else. Any character or animal. Or something abstract.”

  “Surprise me,” I said.

  She smiled again. “No one’s ever asked to be surprised before. Nobody wants to risk looking foolish.”

  “Why would you make me look foolish?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t. Why would I? But most people want to look cool, and there’s a thin line between cool and foolish.”

  I liked her voice. It had a smoky quality. She had not spoken in the dream. The corpse of the little girl, borne along after her, was the one that said contumax.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, as she studied her bottles of paint and evidently considered what design she intended to create.

  “Connie. What’s yours?”

  “Norman,” I replied, and wondered if we both had lied. “How long have you worked in the carnival?”

  “I grew up in it. What do you do, Norman?”

  “I’m a librarian.”

  She met my eyes. “You don’t look like a librarian.”

  “What do I look like?”

  “You look like an Ethan, not a Norman, and you look like maybe a Navy SEAL or an Army Ranger, not a librarian.”

  “Not really. I’m no tough guy.”

  “Truly tough guys never say they’re tough.”

  “Some of them do. And then they beat on you to prove it.”

  Opening a bottle of paint, she said, “You don’t look beaten up.”

  “I avoid confrontation.”

  “By taking the other guy down before he lands a blow?”

  “I prefer to run like hell away from him.”

  Picking up a brush, she said, “Please close your eyes and keep them closed. I don’t want to get paint in them.”

  I closed my eyes and asked, “Why Ethan?”

  “I have an older brother named Ethan. The name is from the Hebrew, meaning permanent, assured.”

  “Does he paint faces, too?”

  “He was supposed to run the Bingo Palace that my dad owns. But he wanted to do something else. If the brush tickles, tell me, and I’ll use a sponge instead, as much as I can.”

  “It doesn’t tickle. What does your brother do?”

  “He’s a Navy SEAL.”

  I wanted to open my eyes to study
hers, but I didn’t. “So I must look a little like your brother.”

  “You don’t look anything like him. But you have an Ethan quality about you.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “It’s the best thing.”

  “You’re embarrassing me here.”

  “That’s something Ethan would say.”

  She worked quickly, and in ten minutes or so, she told me that I could look, whereupon she gave me a large hand mirror.

  Around my eyes, she had painted a harlequin’s mask. Otherwise, from hairline to jawline, she’d drawn a pattern of black and white diamonds so perfectly straight-edged in spite of the contours of my face that it had the effect of making my features all but disappear into that rigid geometry. Even Stormy would not have recognized me.

  “A harlequin is a clown,” I said.

  “More accurately, a buffoon. When I asked how you would like to look, you said, ‘Different. Very different.’ I can’t imagine anything more different from what you are than a buffoon.”

  I met her stare and said, “Have you ever had a dream that came true, Connie?”

  She didn’t immediately reply. She took the mirror from me and put it on the table. She met my stare and held it and at last said, “Only once. I don’t dream all that much.”

  “Was it a dream about a flood, a whole town drowned in it?”

  She glanced at her mother, who had finished with the second teenager and was working on a ten-year-old girl while the child’s parents watched with delight. None of them were paying attention to us, but Connie lowered her voice anyway. “No. Not a flood. It was a dream about … about this guy who walks in here and wants to look ‘Different. Very different.’ ”

  Her expression was so solemn that I believed her.

  “Dreamed it just last night,” she said.

  “I told you to surprise me, and you just did.”

  “In the dream, I knew the guy was in trouble, he had enemies.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Probably you shouldn’t say anything. If you did, maybe your trouble would become mine.”

  I nodded, took out my wallet, and paid her.

  As I turned to leave the tent, she said, “Don’t worry. Your own mother wouldn’t know you.”

  I said, “She never has.”

  Eighteen

  Painted to deceive, I set out in search of what I did not know. The vast majority of those attending the carnival didn’t sport a mask from Face It; however, there were enough of us that no one seemed to be especially interested in me.

  I walked the fairground midway, where the Whip lashed its riders this way and that, where the Caterpillar enveloped screaming patrons in darkness as it slung them around a track a thousand times faster than any real caterpillar could move, where the Big Drop lifted its gondola two hundred feet into the night and then released it in what seemed to be an uncontrolled free fall, and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience.

  It’s difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide.

  The carnival blazed, every ride and many other attractions decorated with low-watt bulbs, neon tubes, blinkers, and twinklers. Strings of colored lights overhung the U-shaped concourse. At the curve of the U, mounted on a flatbed truck and reliant on a chugging gasoline-powered generator, two massive swiveling spotlights threw their beams into the heavens, revealing the bellies of an armada of clouds, like dirigibles, invading silently from the southwest.

  In spite of all the colorful lighting that had been crafted to attract patrons and to put them in a celebratory mood, the carnival had an air of hostility and menace that, I felt sure, was not merely my perception. Within all the dazzle and glitter and bright fake glamor, a hidden presence lurked, a watchful darkness that observed and hated and waited, a presence I had not sensed six years earlier.

  Although the warm air was richly scented with the aromas of buttered popcorn, candy apples, cotton candy, the cinnamon and sugar and fried dough of churros, nevertheless, as I threaded through the colorful tapestry of people on the concourse, there were times when a delicious aroma suddenly soured. For just a moment, cinnamon had a sulfurous edge and the popcorn butter smelled rancid, as if under all its pretense of good healthy fun, the carnival was a dangerous swamp in which moldered and festered things too horrific to contemplate.

  The fun house featured the giant face of an ogre, twenty feet from chin to crown, nearly that wide, a dimensional sculpture of such imaginative detail that it managed to be scary at the same time that it was pure hokum. Periodically a roar issued from its open mouth, and with the roar came a forceful blast of air that traveled about twenty feet into the promenade, surprising people who encountered it for the first time, mussing their hair and startling them so that popcorn was dropped halfway from box to mouth.

  The ogre’s crazed eyes rolled in their sockets, but I knew that I was being paranoid to think that it was watching me in particular.

  The ballyhoo of pitchmen, the clatter and whoosh of the rides, the interlaced melodies of scores of different songs associated with various attractions, and the chatter and laughter of a few thousand voices appeared to inspire bright-eyed delight among many of the patrons. To me, it sounded like a shrill discordant symphony to which I might expect to see a horde of bodachs quivering and capering in an ecstasy of anticipated chaos—though I had not glimpsed even one of them among this multitude.

  Within ten minutes I came to a large tent where flamboyant lettering emblazoned on the canvas above the entrance promised ALL THINGS FORETOLD. In smaller script under those words appeared the come-on 33 OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN YOUR FUTURE. The words were encircled by symbols associated with soothsayers and oracles through the ages: a pentalph created with five interlaced A’s, an ankh, a quarter moon encircled by seven stars, the palm of a hand with a single eye gazing out from it.…

  I hadn’t needed psychic magnetism to lead me to this place. I had half convinced myself that I would discover the cultists in the carnival, but my truest reason for coming there, more unconscious than not, had been to learn if the fortune-telling machine, Gypsy Mummy, still dispensed predictions.

  As on that well-remembered night six years earlier, a sawdust floor had been spread wall to wall. It lent a woodsy smell to the arcade. Thirty-three machines of prophecy were arranged in rows, some quaint contraptions dating to the 1940s, others of recent invention.

  You could use two controls to operate a mechanical claw—the Hand of Fate—to fish among a collection of small painted, numbered wooden balls in a glass case. Once the claw seized a number, you could press the corresponding digit on a keyboard, whereupon your fortune would be dispensed to you on a printed card.

  You could seek your future on a video screen, where for fifty cents you would be dealt seven virtual playing cards, facedown, from which you were to select three, then seven more from which you were to select two, then seven more from which you were to select another two. When all the cards you chose were then revealed, the machine printed under each its meaning and combined the seven in a single prognostication.

  Or you could instead choose any of thirty-one other contraptions that would, with machinelike indifference, tell you if you would have a long life or a short one, a happy marriage or one of wedded misery. Fifteen or twenty people were sampling the various oracles, moving on to another if they didn’t like what the first had prophesied.

  In the center of the tent, on an el
evated platform, a cashier sat within a small circular desk, changing dollar bills into quarters when she wasn’t reading a Nora Roberts romance novel. Even before I went looking for it, I was certain that I would find what I sought, and so I got change for two dollars.

  At the back of the tent, where it had been on that long-ago night, Gypsy Mummy stood as if she’d been waiting six years just for me.

  Nineteen

  Roughly the shape of an old-fashioned phone booth, the machine stood seven feet high. The lower three feet were enclosed, and the upper four featured glass on three sides. In that display case sat a female dwarf in a costume of the kind Gypsies wore only in old movies starring Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi, or Boris Karloff. Black ballet slippers. Black silk pants. A red-and-gold scarf for a belt, a red-and-black scarf tied around the head. She evidently liked jewelry: two necklaces, a pendant, several rings with large stones, and big dangling earrings.

  Gnarled and withered, her bejeweled hands rested palms-down on her thighs. Her fingernails were green, perhaps not with polish but with mold.

  Her skin appeared to be as crisp as paper, wrinkled and yet stretched so tight across the skull that it seemed as though at any moment it might split open from the stress. Her eyelids and her lips were sewn shut with black thread.

  According to a plaque, here before me sat the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf, a renowned fortune-teller in eighteenth-century Europe, so accurate in her predictions that she’d been summoned before royalty in three kingdoms to consult with monarchs. In truth, the figure had most likely been sculpted by a low-rent artist who worked best when inebriated.