Текст книги "Supernatural Noir "

Автор книги: Paul Tremblay

Соавторы: Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan,Brian Evenson,Joe R. Lansdale,Lucius Shepard,Laird Barron,Nate Southard,Gregory Frost,John Langan,Richard Bowes,Tom Piccirilli
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

The wolf howled again and another answered. The beasts sounded close, and she wondered if they were circling the cabin, wondered if they smelled her and Miranda, or whether their night vision was so acute they could see her in the window—half in the bag, a bottle dangling from her hand, favoring her left leg, weak and cut from the herd. She considered the cautionary tale of Sven Haugstad and drank some more. Her head spun. She waited for another howl, determined to answer with her own.

Miranda’s arms encircled her. She cupped Lorna’s breasts and licked her earlobe, nibbled her neck. Lorna cried out and grabbed Miranda’s wrist before she registered who it was and relaxed. “Holy crap, you almost gave me a heart attack!” The floor creaked horribly; they’d even played a game of chopsticks by rhythmically pressing alternating sections with their shoes, but she hadn’t heard her lover cross the room. Not a whisper.

–

Something metallic snicked and an orange flame reflected in the window, and sweet, sharp smoke filled Lorna’s nostrils. Miranda gently pressed a cigarette to Lorna’s lips. Miranda said, “I needed this earlier, except I was too damned lazy to leave the covers. Better late than never.”

“God, you read my mind.” Lorna took a drag, then exhaled contentedly. The nicotine mixed with the alcohol did its magic. Her fear of the night land and its creatures receded. “I guess I can forgive you for sneaking up on me since you’ve offered me the peace pipe. Ahhh, I’ve fallen off the wagon. You’re evil. Did you hear the wolves?”

“Those aren’t wolves,” Miranda said. She reclaimed the cigarette. She inhaled, and the cigarette’s cherry floated in the window as her face floated in the window, a blur over Lorna’s shoulder. “Those are coyotes.”

“No shit?”

“Is that why you’re so jumpy? You thought the wolves were gonna get you?”

“I’m not jumpy. Well, sheesh—an almost full moon, wolves howling on the moor—er, in the woods. Gotta admit it’s all kinda spooky.”

“Not wolves. Coyotes. Come to bed . . . It’s chilly.”

“Right. Coyotes,” Lorna said. “I’m embarrassed. That’s like peeing myself over dingoes or raccoons.”

Snug under a pile of blankets, Lorna was drifting off to sleep when Miranda said in a dreamy voice, “Actually, coyotes are much scarier than wolves. Sneaky, sneaky little suckers. Eat you up. Lick the blood all up.”

“What?” Lorna said. Miranda didn’t answer. She snored.

–

One morning, a woman who resembled Vivien Leigh at the flowering of her glory knocked on the door. She wore a green jacket and a green-and-yellow kerchief and yellow sunglasses. Her purse was shiny red plastic with a red plastic strap. Her gloves were white. Her skirt was black and her shoes were also black. She smiled when Lorna opened the door, and her lipstick was blood red like the leaves. “Oh, I’m very sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I seem to be a trifle lost.” The woman introduced herself as Beth. She’d gone for a drive in the hills, searching for the Muskrat Creek campground.

“Apparently, I zigged when I should’ve zagged,” she said, and laughed a laugh worthy of the stage. “Speaking of zigzags, do you mind?” She opened an enamel case and extracted a cigarette and inserted it into a silver holder and lighted up with a stick match. It was all very mesmerizing.

Lorna had nearly panicked upon hearing the knock, convinced Bruce had tracked her down. She invited the woman inside and gave her a cup of coffee. Miranda had gone on her morning walk, which left Lorna with the task of entertaining the stranger while deflecting any awkward questions. She unpacked the road map from her Subaru and spread it across the table. She used a pencil to mark the campgrounds, which were twenty-odd miles from the cabin. Beth had wandered far off course, indeed.

“Thank goodness I came across you. These roads go on forever.” Beth sipped her coffee and puffed on her fancy cigarette. She slipped her sunglasses into her purse and glanced around the cabin. Her gaze traveled slowly, weighing everything it crossed. “You are certainly off the beaten path.”

“We’re private people,” Lorna said. “Where’s your car?”

Beth gestured toward the road. “Parked around the corner. I didn’t know if I could turn around in here, so I walked. Silly me, I broke a heel.” She raised her calf to show that indeed, yes, the heel of her left pump was wobbly.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. I was supposed to meet friends at the campgrounds, but I can’t reach anybody. No bars. I’m rather cross with them and their directions.”

Lorna blinked, taking a moment to realize the woman meant she couldn’t get proper phone reception. “Mine works fine. I’d be happy to let you place a call—”

“Thanks anyway, sweetie.” Beth had sketched directions inside a notebook. “It’ll be a cinch now that I’ve got my bearings.” She finished her coffee, said thanks and goodbye, waving jauntily as she picked her way down the rutted lane.

Lorna started the generator to get hot water for a quick shower. After the shower, she made toast and more coffee and sat at the table relaxing with a nice paperback romance, one of several she’d had the foresight to bring along. Out the window, she glimpsed movement among the trees, a low and heavy shape that she recognized as a large dog—no, not a dog, a wolf. The animal almost blended with the rotten leaves and wet brush, and it nosed the earth, moving disjointedly, as if crippled. When it reared on its hind legs, Lorna gasped. Miranda pulled back the cowl of the hide cloak and leaned against a tree. Her expression was strange; she did not quite appear to be herself. She shuddered in the manner of a person emerging from a trance and walked to where the driveway curved and left three paper plates pressed into the bank. She spaced the plates about three feet apart. Each bore a bull’s-eye drawn in magic marker.

Miranda came inside. She’d removed the hide. Her hair was messy and tangled with twigs and leaves. “Who was here?” Her voice rasped like she’d been shouting.

“Some woman looking for a campground.” Lorna recounted the brief visit, too unnerved to mention what she’d witnessed. Her heart raced and she was overcome by dizziness that turned the floor to a trampoline. Miranda didn’t say anything. She opened a duffel bag and brandished a revolver. She examined the pistol, snapping its cylinder open, then shut. Lorna wasn’t particularly conversant with guns, but she’d watched Bruce enough to know this one was loaded. “I thought we were going to discuss it before you bought one,” she said.

Miranda rattled a small box of shells and slipped them into the pocket of her vest. “I didn’t buy one. A friend gave it to me when I told him about Brucifer. An ex-cop. This sucker doesn’t have a serial number.”

“There’s no reason to be upset. She was lost. That’s all.”

“Of course she was.”

Lorna watched her put the gun in her other pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“You’ve only paid cash, right? No debit card, no credit card?”

“You mean in town?”

“I mean anywhere. Like we agreed. No credit cards.”

“Tell me what’s wrong. She was lost. People get lost. It’s not unheard of, you know. And it doesn’t matter. I didn’t tell her my name. I didn’t tell her anything. She was lost. What was I supposed to do? Not answer the door? Maybe stick that gun in her face and demand some ID?”

“The campgrounds are closed,” Miranda said. “I was outside the door while she gave you her shuck and jive. She came in a panel van. A guy with a beard and sunglasses was driving. Didn’t get a good look at him.”

Lorna covered her face. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

Miranda’s boots made loud clomping sounds as she walked to the door. She hesitated for a few moments, then said, “It’s okay. You handled her fine. Bruce has got entirely too much money.”

Lorna nodded and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “We’ll see how much money he has after my lawyer gets through with him.”

Miranda smiled. It was thin and pained, but a smile. She shut the door behind her. Lorna curled into a ball on the bed. The revolver fired, its report muffled by the thick walls of the cabin. She imagined the black holes in the white paper. She imagined black holes drilling through Bruce’s white face. Pop, pop, pop.

–

Miranda brought Lorna to a stand of trees on the edge of a clearing and showed her the hunting blind. The bloody sun fell into the earth and the only slightly less bloody moon swung, like a pendulum, to replace it in the lower black of the sky. “That is one big, bad yellow moon,” Miranda said.

“It’s beautiful,” Lorna said. “Like an iceberg sliding through space.” She thought the fullness of the moon, its astral radiance, presaged some kind of cosmic shift. Her blood sang and the hairs on her arms prickled. It was too dark to see the platform in the branches, but she felt it there, heard its timbers squeak in the breeze.

“Been having strange dreams,” Miranda said. “Most of them are blurry. Last one I remember was about the people who used to live around here, a long time ago. They weren’t gentle folks, that’s for sure.”

“Well, of course not,” Lorna said. “They stuck a deer head over the fireplace and skinned poor, hapless woodland critters and hung them in the trees.”

“Yeah,” Miranda said. She lighted a cigarette. “Want one?”

“No.”

Miranda smoked most of her cigarette before she spoke again. “In the latest dream it was winter, frost thick on the windows. I sat on the bearskin rug. Late at night, a big fire crackling away, and an old man, I mean, old as dirt, was kicked back in a rocker, talking to me, telling me stuff. I couldn’t see his face because he sat in the shadows. He wore old-timey clothes and a fur jacket, and a hat made out of an animal head. Coyote or wolf. He explained how to set a snare for rabbits, how to skin a deer. The dream changed and jumped around, like dreams do, and we were kneeling on the floor by the carcass of—I dunno what. A possum, I think. The meat was green and soft; it had been dead a while. The old man told me a survivor eats what’s around. Then he stuck his face into that mess of stinking meat and took a bite.”

“That’s a message,” Lorna said. “The great universal consciousness is trying to tell you—us—to adapt. Adapt or die.”

“Or it could be a dream, full stop.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I think it’s time to get our minds right. Face the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?”

“We’re never going to get away,” Miranda said.

“Well, that’s a hell of an attitude.”

“I saw that van again. Parked in that gravel pit just down the road. They’re watching us, Lorna.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Don’t worry about those bastards. They’ll be dealt with.”

“Dealt with? Dealt with how?” Lorna’s mind flashed to the revolver. The notion of Miranda shooting anyone in cold blood was ridiculous. Yet, here in the dark beyond the reach of rule or reason, such far-fetched notions bore weight. “Don’t get any crazy ideas.”

“I mean, don’t worry yourself sick over the help. Nah, the bigger problem is your husband. How much time is Bruce going to get? A few months? A year? Talk about your lawyer. Bruce’s lawyer is slick. He might not get anything. Community service, a stern admonition from the judge to go forth and sin no more.”

Lorna winced. Stress caused her leg to throb. The cigarette smoke drove her mad with desire. She stifled a sharp response and regarded the moon instead. Her frustration dissolved in the presence of its cold, implacable majesty. She said, “I know. It’s the way of the world. People like Bruce always win.” She’d called Orillia earlier that evening, asked her how things were going at the new school. Orillia didn’t want to talk about school; she wanted to know when she could see Daddy again, worried that he was lonely. Lorna had tried to keep emotion from her voice when she answered that Mom and Dad were working through some issues and everything would soon be sorted. Bruce was careful not to hit Lorna in front of their daughter, and though Orillia witnessed the bruises and the breaks, the sobbing aftermath, she seemed to disassociate these from her father’s actions.

“There are other ways to win.” Miranda was a black shadow against the dead silver grass. “Like you said—adapt or die. The old man showed me. In the beginning you need a prop, but it gets easier when you realize it’s all in your head.”

It was a long walk back through the woods. Dry leaves crunched beneath their shoes. They locked themselves into the cabin and got ready for bed.

Lorna’s dreams had been strange as well, but she’d kept quiet. She wasn’t open about such things, not even with Miranda. The ghost of old man Haugstad didn’t speak to Lorna; instead, her dreams transported her to the barren slopes above the tree line of the valley. The moon fumed and boiled. She was a passenger in another’s body, a body that seethed with profound vitality. The moon’s yellow glow stirred her blood, and she raced down the slope and into the trees. She smelled the land, tasted it on her lolling tongue, drawing in the scent of every green deer spoor, every droplet of coyote musk, every spackling of piss on rock or shrub. She smelled fresh blood and meat-blacked bone. There were many, many bones scattered across the mountainside. Generational heaps of them—ribs, thighs, horns, skulls. These graveyards were secret places, scattered for miles across deep, hidden caches and among the high rocks.

Lorna stroked Miranda’s belly. Miranda’s excess had melted away in recent days. She was lean from daylong hikes and skipped meals, and her scent was different, almost gamy, her hair lank and coarse. She was restless and she whined in her sleep. She bit too hard when they made love.

Miranda took Lorna’s hand and said, “What is it?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to leave.”

“Oh, where the fuck is this coming from?”

“Something’s different. Something’s changed. You weren’t honest about where you found the coat. The skin.”

Miranda chuckled without humor. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“I’m not in the mood for cute,” Lorna said.

“My sweet one. I left out the part that might . . . frighten you. You’re skittish enough.”

“I’m also not in the mood for twenty questions. What did you mean earlier—the old man showed you?”

“Old man Haugstad told me where to look, what I needed to do.”

“In a dream.”

“Not in a dream. The day I discovered the blind, a coyote skulked out of the bushes and led me along the path. It was the size of a mastiff, blizzard white on the muzzle and crisscrossed with scars.”

“I don’t understand,” Lorna said, but was afraid she might.

“We’re here for a reason. Can’t you feel the power all around us? After I lost Jack, after I finally accepted he was gone, I pretty much decided to off myself. If I hadn’t met you at that party I probably would’ve died within a few days. I’d picked out the pills, the clothes I intended to wear, knew exactly where it was going to happen. When was the only question.”

Lorna began to cry.

“I won’t leave you. But it’s possible you might decide not to come with me.” Miranda rolled to her opposite side and said nothing more. Lorna slowly drifted to sleep. She woke later while it was still dark. Miranda’s side of the bed was a cold, blank space. Her clothes were still piled on the floor. In a moment of sublimely morbid intuition, Lorna clicked on a flashlight and checked the spare bedroom where Miranda had taken to hanging the fur cloak from a hook on the door. Of course the cloak was missing.

She gathered her robe tightly, sparing a moment to reflect upon her resemblance to the doomed heroines on any number of lurid gothic horror-novel covers, and went outdoors into the freezing night. Her teeth chattered and her fear became indistinguishable from the chill. She poked around the cabin, occasionally calling her lover’s name, although in a soft tone, afraid to attract the attention of the wolves, the coyotes, or whatever else might roam the forest at night.

Eventually she approached the woodshed and saw that the door was cracked open by several inches. She stepped inside. Miranda crouched on the dirt floor. The flashlight was weak, and its flickering cone only hinted and suggested. The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took notice of the pallid light, and as she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda’s musculature.

The flashlight glass cracked and imploded. The shed lay in utter darkness, except for a thin sliver of moonlight that burned yellow in Miranda’s eyes. Lorna’s mouth was dry. She said, “Sweetheart?”

Miranda said, in a voice rusty and drugged, “Why don’t you . . . go on to bed. I’ll be along. I’ll come see you real soon.” She stood, a ponderous yet lithe uncoiling motion, and her head scraped the low ceiling.

Lorna got out fast and stumbled toward the cabin. She didn’t look over her shoulder, even though she felt hot breath on the back of her neck.

–

They didn’t speak of the incident. For a couple of days they hardly spoke at all. Miranda drifted in and out of the cabin like a ghost, and Lorna dreaded to ask where she went in the dead of night, why she wore the hide and nothing else. Evening temperatures dipped below freezing, yet Miranda didn’t appear to suffer; on the contrary, she thrived. She hadn’t eaten a bite from their store of canned goods, hadn’t taken a meal all week. Lorna lay awake staring at the ceiling as the autumn rains rattled the windows.

One afternoon she sat alone at the kitchen table downing the last of the Old Crow. The previous evening she’d experienced two visceral and disturbing dreams. In the first she was serving drinks at a barbecue. There were dozens of guests. Bruce flipped burgers and hobnobbed with his office chums. Orillia darted through the crowd with a water pistol, zapping hapless adults before dashing away. The mystery woman, Beth, and a bearded man in a track suit she introduced as her husband came over and told her what a lovely party, what a lovely house, what a lovely family, and Lorna handed them drinks and smiled a big, dumb smile as Miranda stood to the side and winked, nodding toward a panel van parked nearby on the grass. The van rocked, and a coyote emerged from beneath the vehicle, growling and slobbering and snapping at the air. Grease slicked the animal’s fur black, made its yellow eyes bright as flames.

A moment later, Lorna was in the woods, chasing the bearded man from the party. His track suit flapped in shreds, stained with blood and dirt. The man tripped and fell over a cliff. He crashed in a sprawl of broken limbs, his mouth full of shattered teeth and black gore. He raised a mutilated hand toward her in supplication. She bounded down and mounted him, licked the blood from him, then chewed off his face. She’d awakened with a cry, bile in her throat.

Lorna set aside the empty bottle. She put on her coat and got the revolver from the dresser where Miranda had stashed it for safekeeping. Lorna hadn’t fired the gun, despite Miranda’s offer to practice. However, she’d seen her lover go through the routine—cock the hammer, pull the trigger, click, no real trick. She didn’t need the gun, wouldn’t use the gun, but somehow its weight in her pocket felt good. She walked down the driveway, moving gingerly to protect her bum knee, then followed the road to the gravel pit where the van was allegedly parked. The rain slackened to drizzle. Patches of mist swirled in the hollows and the canyons and crept along fern beds at the edges of the road. The valley lay hushed, a brooding giant.

The gravel pit was empty. A handful of charred wood and some squashed beer cans confirmed someone had definitely camped there in the not-so-distant past. She breathed heavily, partially from the incessant throb in her knee, partially from relief. What the hell would she have done if the assholes her husband sent were on the spot roasting wienies? Did she really think people like that would evaporate upon being subjected to harsh language? Did she really have the backbone to flash the gun and send them packing, John Wayne style?

She thought the first muffled cry was the screech of a bird, but the second shout got her attention. Her heart was pounding when she finally located the source, about a hundred yards farther along the road. Tire tracks veered from the narrow lane toward a forty-foot drop into a gulch of trees and boulders. The van had landed on its side. The rear doors were sprung, the glass busted. She wouldn’t have noticed it all the way down there, if not for the woman crying for help. Her voice sounded weak. But that made sense—Beth had been trapped in the wreck for several days, hadn’t she? One snip of the brake line and on these hills, it’d be all over but the crying. Miranda surely didn’t fuck around, did she? Lorna bit the palm of her hand to stifle a scream.

“Hey,” Miranda said. She’d come along as stealthily as the mist and lurked a few paces away near a thicket of brambles. She wore the mangy cloak with the predator’s skull covering her own, rendering her features inscrutable. Her feet were bare. She was naked beneath the pelt, her lovely flesh streaked with dirt and blood. Her mouth was stained wine dark. “Sorry, honey bunch. I really thought they’d have given up the ghost by now. Alas, alack. Don’t worry. It won’t be long. The birds are here.”

Crows hopped among the limbs and drifted in looping patterns above the ruined van. They squawked and squabbled. The woman yelled something unintelligible. She wailed and fell silent. Lorna’s lip trembled and her nose ran with snot. She swept her arm to indicate their surroundings. “Why did you bring me here?”

Miranda tilted her misshapen head and smiled a sad, cruel smile. “I want to save you, baby. You’re weak.”

Lorna stared into the gulch. The mist thickened and began to fill in the cracks and crevices and covered the van and its occupants. There was no way she could navigate the steep bank, not with her injury. Her cell was at the cabin on the table. She could almost hear the clockwork gears of the universe clicking into alignment, a great, dark spotlight shifting across the cosmic stage to center upon her at this moment in time. She said, “I don’t know how to do what you’ve done. To change. Unless that hide is built for two.”

Miranda took her hand and led her back to the cabin and tenderly undressed her. She smiled faintly when she retrieved the revolver and set it on the table. She kissed Lorna, and her breath was hot and foul. Then she stepped back and began to pull the hide away from her body, and as it lifted, so did the underlying skin, peeling like a scab. Blood poured down Miranda’s chest and belly and pattered on the floorboards. The muscles of her cheeks and jaw bunched and she hissed, eyes rolling, and then it was done and the dripping bundle was free of her red-slicked flesh. Lorna was paralyzed with horror and awe, but finally stirred and tried to resist what her lover proffered. Miranda cuffed her temple, stunning her. She said, “Hold still, baby. You’re gonna thank me,” and draped the cloak across Lorna’s shoulders and pulled the skullcap of the beast over Lorna’s eyes.

“You came here for this?” Lorna said as the slimy and overheated pelt cupped her and enclosed her. The room went in and out of focus.

“No, babe. I just followed the trail, and here we are. And it’s good. You’ll see how good it is, how it changes everything. We’ve been living in a cage, but that’s over now.”

“My God, I loved you.” Lorna blinked the blood from her eyes. She glanced over and saw the revolver on the table, blunt and deadly and glowing with the dwindling light, a beacon. She grabbed the weapon without thought and pressed it under Miranda’s chin, and thumbed the hammer just as she’d seen it done. Her entire body shook. “You thought I’d just leave my daughter behind and slink off to Never Never Land without a word? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Give it a minute,” Miranda said. The fingers of her left hand stroked the pelt. “One minute. Let it work its magic. You’ll see everything in a whole new way. Come on, sweetie.” She reached for the revolver, and it barked and twisted in Lorna’s hands.

Lorna didn’t weep. Her insides were stone. She dropped the gun and swayed in place, not focusing on anything. The light began to fade. She stumbled outside. She could smell everything, and strange thoughts rushed through her head.

There was a moment between twilight and darkness when she almost managed to tear free of the hide and begin making the calls that would return her to the world, her daughter, the apocalyptic showdown with the man who’d oppressed her for too long. The moment passed, was usurped by an older and much more powerful impulse. Her thoughts turned to the woods, the hills, a universe of dark, sweet scent. The hunt.

–

Two weeks later, a hiker spotted a murder of crows in a raucous celebration as they roosted around the wrecked van. He called emergency services. Men and dogs and choppers swarmed the mountainside. The case made all of the papers and ran on the local networks for days. Investigators found two corpses—an adult male and an adult female—in the van. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma and prolonged exposure to the elements. Further examination revealed that the brake lines of the van were sawed through, indicative of homicide. The homicide theory was supported by the discovery of a deceased adult female on the floor of a nearby cabin. She’d died of a single bullet wound to the head. A fourth individual who’d also lived on the premises remained missing and was later presumed dead. Tremendous scrutiny was directed at the missing woman’s estranged husband. He professed his innocence throughout the subsequent trial. That he’d hired the deceased couple to spy on his wife didn’t help his case.

Years later, a homicide detective wrote a bestseller detailing the investigation of the killings. Tucked away as a footnote, the author included a few esoteric quotes and bits of trivia; among these were comments by the chief medical examiner who’d overseen the autopsies. According to the ME, it was fortunate that picture ID was present on scene for the deceased. By the time the authorities arrived, animals had gotten to the bodies in the van. The examiner said she’d been tempted to note in her report that in thirty years she’d never seen anything so bizarre or savage as these particular bites, but wisely reconsidered.

–

Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation, both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s-best anthologies. Mr. Barron lives in Olympia, Washington.

| THE ROMANCE |

Elizabeth Bear

–

Last, the bullet blooms against steel. Still almost pristine until that moment, now its conical head flattens. Its copper jacket splinters into shrapnel needles, wire-fine, scattering. The core splashes, the force of impact so great that cold metal splatters like syrup, droplets blossoming in an elegant chrysanthemum. The butt of the casing flattens against the engine block for a split second before it peels away and falls.

But it’s already exited the girl, and the girl is falling.

–

January is baking brownies.

She watches water and butter boil together with a mass of green leaves, once dried and now rehydrating. These are grown-up brownies. Her kitchen reeks of burnt sugar and wet rope, complicated and musty as copal.

She makes sure the water doesn’t boil off. Too-high heat destroys the THC. Cooking is an applied form of chemistry.

She pours the slurry into a pottery bowl through a strainer draped with cheesecloth, then twists the cloth to get the last of the butter. The water and butter go in the fridge to cool. She cleans the tools and starts breaking apart squares of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate, which she will eventually combine with brown sugar and melt into the separated butter.

–

The bullet blasts a gaping exit wound in the girl’s body. It’s not the penetration of the bullet that does this; the bullet is quite small. Rather, it’s transferred energy—a shock wave—that knocks a plug of blood and muscle and skin out of her side, that vaporizes a portion of her body and splashes it over the massive open block of the carousel engine a moment before the bullet splashes, too.

That bullet has already passed through the girl when she reaches weak, estranged hands for the impact point and staggers one step back, then two, teetering among littered tussocks on high heels she never should have worn to the carnival.

–

January takes the brownies to the birthday party. The clamor of the Wurlitzer greets her as soon as she opens her car door, but the carousel is out of sight, turning and turning in its great wood-and-glass enclosure that glows like a Christmas ornament in the blue twilight. The sound of the one-machine band climbs against a clear October evening. The western sky’s still creamy gold, though a band of indigo shows to the east, stars prickling through. January’s breath mists, and oblong yellow leaves somersault across the grass, but once she’s inside she’ll be warm.

For now she tugs her scarf tight and balances the plate of brownies on one hand while locking the car doors with the other. She picks her way over uneven ground, watching another dark shape or two rattle keys, check doors, and drift through the gloaming like ghosts drawn to a sйance. January follows a tall, slender woman in a plain gray dress, much younger than most of the crowd. Somebody’s daughter?

The carousel is housed in a circular structure like a train roundhouse—except smaller, and intricately decorated. The row of windows under the cedar-shake eaves are stained glass—this side, over the open double door, shows autumn scenes shading into winter.