"Peter And The Carnival Of Evil" Page 1

PETER AND THE CARNIVAL OF EVIL

It started with a dream, though Peter didn’t know it at the time.

He woke in bed in the middle of the night with the moon shining across the floor. Everything was silent except for a soft, almost inaudible tapping at the window. Fear gripped his insides for a brief second, and visions of vampire classmates flickered dimly in his brain. But when he sat up, he saw that it was snowing. Large, thick flakes batted against the windowpanes, like the tick tick tick of moths against a faraway lightbulb.

He’d never seen it snow in his life – not unless you counted TV and movies. He’d certainly never seen it fall from the sky in California, where he’d spent his entire life until the last three months. Plenty had been on the ground on the skiing trips he and his mother had made before Beth was born, but he’d never actually seen it snow.

He got out of bed, wrapped his arms around himself for warmth, and moved to the window. He got up on the cushioned ledge and looked down through the blizzard of white…

…and saw himself down on the street.

His heart thudded in his chest.

It was impossible for several reasons. First of all, he couldn’t be in two places at once. Second, he shouldn’t have even been able to see the street from his bedroom window; his room looked out on the giant field behind Grandfather’s house, including the garden patch and the rose bushes.

But there he was, staring back up at himself.

And then he was on the street, just like that, with no memory of how he’d gotten down there.

He was bundled against the cold in layers of scratchy woolen clothes – which was weird, because he didn’t own anything made of wool. But he pulled the scarf and cap and jacket tighter around him as he trudged through the drifting flakes, his boots squeaking with every step he made in the pristine layer of white on the road.

Where he was going, he had no idea. He just knew that he had to keep walking.

Before too long, he found out. Up ahead in the dark loomed a dimly lit ferris wheel that hung still and unmoving in the night sky. As he got closer, he realized why it was dim: about every third light was burnt out or missing. By that point he was close enough to see the fairgrounds and the other attractions around it, like a rickety rollercoaster and a shack of a building with “Hall Of Mirrors” painted over a dark doorway.

Somewhere far away, carnival music drifted through the air. It was soft and sinister, and sounded like it was played on an organ made of hollowed-out bones. Peter shivered, and not from the cold.

Bales of hay formed a makeshift fence around the carnival. Peter walked through a gap, one so large that it was obviously meant to let customers in. But there was not a soul in sight – not a money collector, nor anyone who might have paid entry.

His feet led him to a large tent pitched far away from the attractions, a dumpy shelter made of stained and spattered canvas. He walked through the flap of a doorway and into a makeshift room, carpeted with straw and lit by a single lantern.

From the corner of his eye he noticed a tall, thin man in a trenchcoat standing behind him. Peter glanced back and saw the hand that pulled the canvas door closed. It looked like one of the burned-up hobos in his first adventure at Grandfather’s house, except their hands had been charred black; this hand looked like a skeleton that had been dipped in wax.

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Copyright © 2009 Darren Pillsbury. All rights reserved.