Feature Writer: TamLin01
Feature Title: THE CARNIVAL
Published: 23.08.2023
Story Codes: Erotic Horror
Synopsis: A farewell to the flesh
The Carnival
“What good is the warmth of summer without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?”
-John Steinbeck, “In Search of America”
It was one of those traveling carnivals that blew into towns at the burnt-out end of summer for a week or two and then moved on, taking the season with it–maybe to return next summer, or maybe just to disappear, as things do sometimes.
It was a hot, crowded, noisy midway, full of barkers and bells and hard-tin music and cheap games and cheap money. There were strongmen and tattooed women, dwarfs and tramps and cons, electric lights and painted stalls, and kootchie shows where the dancing girls showed more if you paid extra. There was a ferris wheel that creaked and rattled as it soared over the flat sheet metal roofs of the town, and a carousel with wooden horses, their painted manes flying and nostrils flaring.
There were booths where you could fire a rifle or a bow or a dart to win this thing or that thing—anything–and a high striker, where the barker challenged every skinny country boy as wispy as a cornstalk to hit the bell, and the dunk tank where a jeering clown grinned, Mephistopheles-like, and swore that you couldn’t hit the target to dunk him once in three shots.
(And he was right, you couldn’t—the spring that dropped the board hadn’t worked in more than six years, but he took your money all the same.)
There was a spookhouse, a mirror house, a funhouse, a clockwork museum, and a tent where belly dancers crawled like reptiles; there was calliope music, popcorn, cotton candy, beer, sweat, and want. More often than not the customers (“marks” the carnival folk called them) couldn’t really afford this cheap gambling–the town didn’t have work, or even the prospect of work. But what they did have was a carnival, so they spent money they didn’t have to win nothing, and they were happy enough.
It was a carnival like any other–except for one thing. In a tent much larger than the others–a huge tent in fact, the likes of which some ancient conqueror would have erected on the field of his latest victory–and sequestered at the edge of the fairground, as if the other attractions perhaps wanted to keep a distance from it, there was something extra, something special–something perhaps even grandiose, although few people would have used that word.
Any other traveling entertainment would have called a place like this a freak show, but a hand-painted sign over the tent flap bestowed on it a more dignified name:
“Dr. Cooger’s Museum of Human Oddities, Scientific Curiosities, Medical Marvels & Experiments of Nature.”
The tent was old, and the scenes painted onto its canvas were in much need of renewing, but they still injected life into the promises of the fantastical and lurid. Come one, come all to see: the Exotic Leopard Girl! The Fearsome Queen of Serpents, and her companion the Crocodile Man! The mysterious Missing Link! The Living Mummy! The Midwich Giant! The True Unicorn!
This grand edifice is where the boy lingered. He’d been there for hours already, and when the sun went down and the midway closed and the roustabouts herded the last marks away, he pretended not to notice them closing up, and he kept lingering.
This boy—but he was not a boy, really. He was 18 now, old enough to be called a man, old enough to go fight when the next war came. But inside he still felt like a boy: uncertain, untried, like a bottle no one had ever removed the cork from. Or perhaps he felt like those painted scenes on the tent, faded before their time, their promises of mystery and exoticism dulled by too much road dust and summer sun.
In the twilight hours after the carnival he stayed and watched that tent, as immovable as the pole under the big top. It was going to be a cold night, and his jacket was thin, and his old jeans had holes–but still he didn’t stir. His vigil had something of a religious quality.
It’s possible the boy would have stayed there all night if Griffin hadn’t found him—or that is to say, hadn’t let him know that he’d been found, as in truth Griffin had been aware of him all day. The older man cleared his throat, and the boy jumped a little but didn’t run—barely moved, in fact.
Griffin carried on him an old-fashioned clay pipe, and when he lit a match the boy saw him in full, a studious man with a gray beard, having the look of an old professor whose classroom walls were thick with the residue of his lectures. But there was a shabbiness about him too—like his tent, Griffin seemed in need of rejuvenation, his affect worn and threadbare, his spectacles loose-fitting, his watch fob touched by tarnish. And he couldn’t help but give away some roughneck trappings of the carnival, wearing work shoes beneath his rolled trouser legs, and sporting calloused palms and fingers from many years hauling his act from town to town.
With the match burning down, Griffin thrust the light at the vast square of canvas the boy had scrutinized all this time; the flame jolted the scene to life, and for an instant its colors looked almost new. The side of the tent displayed a beautiful woman lounging on a rock in a remote sea, surrounded by sparkling sapphire waters and sea foam; nothing around suggested land except the white sails of a ship passing—distantly—on the horizon.
She wasn’t a fair-skinned beauty like the girls at the kootchie shows, who would have burnt lobster-red in 20 minutes under the yellow disc of tropical sun in that painted sky. She was tanned and lithesome, with dark hair hanging over much of her face and, alarmingly, glistering yellow eyes behind the flowing locks. From the waist down her body was that of a huge, scaly fish, with a powerful tail and graceful fins that would float like lilies in the water. The writing underneath read:
“FEE-JEE MERMAID.”
And below that, in the same script that adorned the sign out front:
“AS EXHIBITED IN MOST OF THE PRINCIPAL CITIES OF AMERICA, TO THE WONDER AND ASTONISHMENT OF THOUSANDS OF NATURALISTS AND OTHER SCIENTIFIC PERSONS, WHOSE PREVIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF SUCH THINGS WERE ENTIRELY REMOVED!”
Griffin blew the match out, and the script disappeared. With the red glow of his pipe reflected in his spectacles, he said, “So, THAT’s what’s interested you so; I might have known.”
The boy looked embarrassed, as if he’d been caught in the midst of some peculiar sin, but Griffin’s said, “You’ve got nothing to explain yourself to the likes of me. After all, aren’t I the one who brought her here? Oh yes, I know very well why you might stare at that one–I’ve done it myself, more times than I can count.”
Pondering the darkened scene, clouds of smoke floating over his head like steam from the kettle of his rapidly working brain, Griffin regarded the boy closer. “You’ve no money,” he said after a while.
The boy stood up straighter. “I’m not a thief,” he said.
“Of course you’re not: I didn’t say you don’t have money because I think you’re here to steal, I say it because if you had you’d have come in by now. So you haven’t a penny to pay for anything—but you haven’t gone home either. That makes you a bit of a mystery–and mysteries are my business.”
To this the boy said nothing—what in the world could he say? But he let Griffin examine him up and down, and even circle him once, as if he were sizing up a prize pig. After apparently finding him suiting, the older man squared his shoulders and said:
“Well, why don’t you come inside and meet her?” The amazement on the boy’s face must have been evident, because Griffin was already saying, “Yes, really. Come on now, before it gets too late—or I change my mind.”
Although the boy had finished school and was deemed smart enough by everyone with any investment in the question, he did not possess what you might call an abstract mind. If you had proposed that this moment, just before old Griffin ushered him inside the mysterious tent and changed his life forever, was an inflection point in his so-far brief existence, a critical juncture at which his destiny split into two paths, one of them ordinary and the other unimaginable, he wouldn’t have known what to say.
But he FELT it all the same–his heart, his stomach, his loins, and his bones knew that something was happening, even if his brain and tongue couldn’t articulate it. All of us have moments like this, but only a few ever see them for what they really are.
Griffin lifted the flap of the tent, and the boy paused, as if unsure of his step—but Griffin only had to hold the door open for a second more before he went all the way inside and let the tent seal itself behind him. He felt like he’d been swallowed, and the story of Jonah and the lord’s whale flitted briefly into his mind.
“We don’t run the electric lights after hours,” the old man said. “Wait.” And he went about the interior, setting a match to the oil lamps, which flared tentatively to life. The lamplight did not decrease the boy’s anxiety; indeed, the half-and-half twilight world of lamplight might have made it even worse, as if the flames were the dark’s accomplice. On every side now, the boy saw…things. Sometimes beautiful things; sometimes awful things; but most often things drawn from an unreal world where beauty and awfulness mingled until you couldn’t recognize either.
There were the bones of ancient beasts, reassembled and articulated to the imitation of life, taxidermied with old pelts and fake glass eyes, their ancient claws and fangs bared after thousands of years of dust; there were things in jars on shelves and in cabinets, pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with peeled dead eyes staring but never seeing; there were things dissected lovingly into every discrete part, laid out and labeled under glass cases, and things preserved in ancient amber, or melted into the bones of the earth as fossils; great things and small, strange things—alien things.
Here was the body of an ancient savage, preserved in the sucking mud of the peat bog that killed him; and here was the sarcophagus of a high priest, still glistering with gold; here was a thing too great to be a bird, with a razor-lined beak and wings battered from the rifle fire of the prospectors who shot it down nearly 100 years ago. There were plants from the darkest depths of uncharted jungles that lived only on fresh blood, tangles of vines and teeth in steamy terrariums, and an aquarium of the rarest flowering plants from the bottom of the sea, allergic to light, so that guests could see them only by peering through the tinted sides of their specimen jars at where they floated, entirely ignorant of the world on land.
Here too were the things painted on the side of the tent, but not as they appeared out there, as living, breathing, man-sized, and vital: The Missing Link was the stuffed body of a strange, oversized monkey, a trophy from an expedition into the Sierra de Perijaa mountains; the Serpent Queen was the remains of a cobra with a misshapen, disquietingly humanlike face, while the Crocodile Man was in fact the dried husk of a mid-sized alligator with a blunted snout, rounded head, and vaguely mammalian forelimbs—freaks of nature, preserved by the most rudimentary methods.
There were too many things to see all at once—almost too many to count, a legion of shrunken heads, two-headed calves, fossilized footprints, totems and fetishes, amulets and idols, urns and grave markers, meteorites and philosopher’s stones, feathers, horns, fangs, tusks, masks, and other things that had no names, whose makers had died without passing on the words for them or the secrets of their creation.
The boy made a long pilgrimage to every nook and cranny of the huge tent. And then, after an infinitely long time, Griffin snapped a finger to his attention and said: “Well? What do you think?”
His hesitancy gone, the boy answered immediately: “They’re amazing,” he said.
And then:
“But…they’re all fakes.” He said this not with judgment, nor even with disappointment; almost he sounded pleased, as if he’d plumbed the depths of a great mystery and surfaced again with the answers in his grasp.
Griffin sat at his desk doing his ledgers for the day. With his pen still in hand and his eyes on the figures, he nodded and said, “Humbugs; frauds; cons; hokum, flim-flam, imposture—shams, cheats, hoaxes, counterfeits. Swindles, by all accounts. Oh, there’s one or two genuine articles mixed in here and there, I’ll wager; but hardly anyone can tell the difference. In fact, I’d bet the real ones look all the more fake than the fake ones.”
The boy got as close as he dared to the exhibits—not too close, as fake or not, their fearsome appearance in the semi-dark had not diminished—hoping to suss out the secret of their faux anatomied. “You own all this?” he said after some time.
“Indeed.”
“You’re Dr. Cooger?”
“Cooger is dead, to begin with. And it was ‘Mr. Cooger’–he never was a doctor that I knew of. He and I were partners, and he died seven years ago this very season. I am Mr. J. Griffin.”
The boy pulled a stool up to Griffin’s desk—a footstool, too low to sit on, but he sat all the same. “But it’s all really yours?”
“Certainly. Unlike most, I’m in no debt to the carnival owner, and I manage the attraction entirely myself. I am self-sufficient, with the exception that given my age and the tremendous size of the collection I cannot move it all myself, and rely on certain laborers for assistance when the time comes to pack up for another town. For which they’re all well paid.”
The boy nodded to show that he understood, but impatiently he pressed on: “But what I mean is, all of this—the humbug, you called it—when people get mad about being conned, it’s just you who has to answer to them–hundreds of people.”
“Hundreds every day. More than a thousand at the peak of the season–swindled, every last one of them.”
“All those people, fit to be tied at how you cheated them,” the boy said. “Only…they’re not, are they? Because you wouldn’t even be here if they were. They’d have run you out of town on a rail. But…nobody has.”
Griffin looked up from his books. “What’s your name?” he said.
“Isaac.”
“Good Old Testament name. Your father’s a churchgoing man?”
“He was. Before—”
The boy bit his tongue, but Griffin understood him. “Before the drinking, yes. And you?”
“Drinking–or church?”
“Either.”
“Neither.”
“That’s as well. What state is this?” The boy told him. “I’ve been to every state in the union—some of them before they were states,” Griffin said. “Do you know what America is? A godless country. Oh, we have churches aplenty–but no real gods. Nothing solid and visible, like that.” He gestured to one painted totem hanging from a peg. Then he prodded the boy with the toe of his worn shoe. “You don’t understand what it means, I suppose?”
“No,” the boy replied. “I was just going to ask—the mermaid?”
As if remembering, Griffin’s eyes lit up, and then he rose, taking one of the guttering glass lamps with him. “She’s the rarest of my collection, so I don’t keep her on general display; you’ve got to save something for the big finale, after all. Here, hold this.”
The boy held the lamp while Griffin came to a painted cabinet and, with a brass key worn around his neck, unlocked its doors. Its trim was painted red and gold, and on the doors scenes of a roiling green ocean and a rainbow of beautiful tropical fish. Nothing could have prepared the boy for the sheer ugliness of what lay inside: Pinned to the wall and posed in a burlesque of human posture were a trio of gross simian countenances, the flesh of their mummified faces drawn so tight that the lips pulled away from bristling pointed teeth. Whoever preserved the bodies had inserted crude glass eyes into their sockets, so that they seemed to stare in death.
The bottom halves of the taxidermied bodies were scaled fish, the tails much smaller than the rest of their mass might suggest. They didn’t look like creatures that could come anywhere near the sea without floundering—the painted waves of the portable case were as close as such a rough beast would ever get. In all, they were only about two feet long, from crown to tail.
“Now these,” Griffin said, “Are what most places pass off as a Fiji Mermaid. And indeed, I was in the Fiji Islands when I bought the first one, although that’s mostly a coincidence. You can tell what they really are, I suppose? The top bit is nothing more than a monkey–a juvenile one, in fact–while the tails come by way of your everyday salmons. I had a larger one once, mostly composited of the bodies of an orangutan and a Japanese sea bass—suzuki they call them–but I lost it long ago. These little humbugs, though, you can find all over the world, and any halfway clever idiot can make one himself if he gets his hands on the materials.
“But,” said Griffin, and the boy could tell that this was a practiced inflection, the turning point in a speech he’d given countless times to the staring eyes of a million carnival marks since the days of who-knows-when, “you’re already telling yourself there must be more to this. Because why would I bother to keep such cheap souvenirs under lock and key, is that right?”
Trying not to betray his eagerness, the boy nodded.
“Well, you’re a sharp one, I can tell. What I’m about to show you only a lucky handful in any town ever see: It was my initial investment in the attraction, a specimen so great that old Cooger couldn’t turn it down. He offered a small fortune for it, but what I wanted was the partnership. Now he’s gone and all this is mine, and I’ve got this here to thank for it. But you want to see her, I suppose?
“I–yes,” the boy said.
Griffin regarded him with studying eyes. “And what do you imagine I’m about to show you?”
“I…I mean, I know you don’t really have a mermaid here in this tent–I’m not a sucker. But what I couldn’t figure out—the thing that kept me coming back here—is what you did have instead? What could you be showing people that they wouldn’t feel cheated?”
“And have you figured it out?”
“No sir.”
The look on Griffin’s face made the boy worry that he might have said something to offend the older man. It wasn’t until Griffin came to take the lamp back from him and the light shone more fully on his face that he perceived what the real expression was: gratitude.
“So you’ve no money at all?” The boy’s heart picked up. He realized–very suddenly–that he might have been conned, that now that he’d come in and seen the attraction that Griffin could perhaps argue that he owed him the price of admission. Too afraid to speak, he shook his head. The old man grunted. “Hm. And what would you do with it if you did?”
“Sir?”
Griffin came back with something in his outstretched palm. In the center of it, like holy manna, was a $100 bill. The boy had never seen anything like it in his life.
“If I gave this to you right now,” he continued, “what would you do? Maybe go out to the midway tomorrow and play every game? See every kind of painted wonder in every stall? Go into that tent where the girls dance, those sirens of the land, and maybe one of them will take an extra liking to you—they do sometimes, I’ve seen it happen.”
He folded the money once, with a hard crease in the center.
“You could go out and be young and play the young man’s game. Or…” And here he retracted his hand. “Say no to all that—and instead I’ll show you my biggest secret–the rarest of the rare. Either way it’s up to you. But you have to decide—now.”
The boy gaped; what could he say? What did it mean? Griffin’s face offered him no clues; he looked impassive, almost sphinx-like. “You mean, you’ll pay me $100 to go away?”
“Money to go away, or a great secret to stay–that’s your choice. Seems like you win either way, doesn’t it?” Griffin smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression. The smile meant that he knew what the boy was thinking: That carnival games always LOOKED like you couldn’t lose, but all that really meant was that you couldn’t win. And that’s what this was: a carnival game. The boy didn’t know what the rules were or what the prize was, but he knew that the old man had picked him out as a mark all the same.
Still, he might as well play: His body seemed to take on a life of his own, and his hand was reaching out for the money almost before he realized he was doing it. A hundred dollars; more than he’d had at one time in his entire life. More money, maybe, than he’d had in his entire life put together. Money to live like a king…
But he snatched his hand back at the last moment. Looking the older man in his rounded spectacles, he nodded. “All right then: the secret. Show me, if it’s so great as all that.”
Griffin put the cash away. Then he put out all of the lamps except one, and turned that one so low that Griffin himself almost vanished in the gloom. His every hair standing up, the boy watched what was happening as best he could in the dark. Taking the big brass key to the painted mermaid’s cabinet again, Griffin unlocked another door, a secret one at the false back of the display; the door swung open under its own weight, ferrying the grimacing little taxidermied monkeys out of sight. Behind them, so large that it almost didn’t fit at all, was something…else.
At first the boy thought she was alive: Her face, her eyes, her dappled skin, the way her curly hair hung about her perfectly rounded shoulders, all of it was the picture of vitality. Especially those eyes, the great, glittering, yellow depths of them, eyes from another world, eyes that had seen shadowy eons beneath the crushing black waves of such distant seas that the waters from them had still never reached these shores.
The boy imagined there was a smell in the air now, like salt and wind, a sea smell, the smell of a wharf or a boardwalk or an old tall ship, a smell that made him nostalgic for things that had never happened to him. The dark skin of the woman in the cabinet was tinged blue, and webbing connected her thin and supple fingers.
But of course it was below the waist that she was strangest of all, her long, snaking, fishy tail coiled up beneath and behind her, wrapped so many times that the boy couldn’t count the loops. She’d never have fit otherwise, but even as constrained as she was, he could still see the delicacy of each fin, and the sapphire gleam of each blue scale.
He had thought at first that she was alive, but quickly the boy realized that was impossible. She must be another taxidermied thing, another creation of the mysterious crafters of humbugs and scams. And yet…
“There’s something about her, isn’t there?” Griffin said, finishing the boy’s own thoughts. In reply, the boy merely exhaled, realizing that he’d been holding his breath for some time. “You can imagine exactly what she would have looked like, in that age before the lands rose above the sea–an Atlantean place that time forgot, where the fish would surely all be giant monsters, like at the beginning of time. She’s our ambassador from that age–the last one, perhaps. Maybe the only one we’ve ever had.”
The boy stood rooted in his shoes, and he raised a hand, as if to touch her—but that would be profane, he quickly realized, and stopped almost as soon as he’d started. His heart swelled up in his chest so large that he could hardly speak, and when he did the only thing he could think to say was: “She’s…real. I mean, isn’t she?”
“Of course she is. ‘Sirenus Oceanus,’ I call her—that’s the proper scientific name.”
“But she can’t be. You must have made her.”
“Must I?” Griffin said, his voice a bland whirr. “No, not this one: She looked exactly like this the first time I ever saw her. And I felt exactly what you’re feeling now: Knowing not only that she was real, but that she knows us too. She’s not alive–but she’s not exactly dead either. There’s something in her, not a soul or a spirit, but something that’s never entirely left her body, and maybe never will. I wonder if she can even see us…” But the old man stopped, as if realizing for the first time what he was saying.
The boy wanted to get closer, but the worn soles of his shoes scraped only a few inches on the dirt floor. It was like meeting an animal in the wild—captivating, but at the same time your wits told you that you had to be ready to flee if need be. It was a primitive impulse, one that came from the sea itself. He thought perhaps the woman (not a woman, he corrected himself, in spite of how she looked) leaned forward too–but that was impossible.
But she WAS looking at him, the boy was sure. He didn’t know how or why, but he knew. “She likes you,” Griffin said after a time.
“Where’d she come from? You said she’d been like this ever since you got her–but where was that? How was that?”
“That’s the gimmick, boy: You’ll never know,” Griffin said, and all at once he shut the cabinet again. Gently but firmly, Griffin turned the boy around and led him to the door. “That’s enough for now; few people ever see this—only a handful each year, and sometimes none at all. The marks, they’re content with the humbug; only a special few ever see the real thing.”
“How…how is it possible?”
“Ours is not to question how. Such things are mysteries—a mystery of the deep in this case. Quite an adventure for one night, yes?” The lamp on the desk was burning low—it needed refueling.
“I’ll say,” said the boy. Then: “Why did you show me that?”
“You wanted to see.”
“Lots of people would want to see. Why me?”
Instead of answering right away, Griffin took him outside. It was still night—only a few minutes had passed, but it felt like almost forever. The boy waited for an answer, but instead Griffin took him for a walk. He realized they were leaving the campground, and once again he started to worry–sometimes the carnival folk got tired of robbing you with cons and just decided to do it the old-fashioned way, he knew, if you were dumb enough to be caught alone with them. It wouldn’t make any sense for the old man to rob him now, but he felt anxious all the same.
But they reached the shoulder of the road without incident, and it was only then that Griffin spoke again. “When I offered you the money, you thought I was scamming you; you must have, because you’ve got a brain. But you went along anyway Why? Because I tricked you? No. What then?”
The boy spent a long time answering—not because he didn’t know the answer, but because he was startled to realize how obvious it was. “I guess…I must have wanted to be scammed. Just like the people who come into your tent to see the fakes; that’s why they’re not mad. People like being conned; it doesn’t make any sense, but it must be true. And you don’t show most people the real mermaid because…most of them would rather see what’s fake instead. Wouldn’t they?”
Griffin took the boy’s hand. He thought at first it was just a handshake, but then he felt something in his palm: the $100 bill.
“Come back tomorrow night,” Griffin said. “After closing we’ll talk more.”
Amazed, the boy said nothing. Only when Griffin had already walked away did he call after:
“I’ll be here! I’ll come back, whatever you say.” Then: “Will you show her to me again?”
But the dark didn’t give any answers.
***
The boy did come back the next night, and the night after, and every night he could, always waiting until after the carnival closed and drove out the last of the townies. Slipping into Griffin’s tent, he found the older man waiting for him.
As Griffin directed, the boy did work around the collection—dusting, polishing, sanding, sweeping. Within two weeks, he was almost as familiar with the assembled objects as Griffin was. While he worked, Griffin talked: about the carnival, about the past, about the days when shows like this specialized in live acts—freaks, geeks, and human oddities—until most places outlawed such things.
He explained every trick on the midway, every act in every tent and stall and how each of them worked, as well as how to pick marks and how to pick pockets with a smile and a slap on the back. Every good carnival, Griffin said, was a scam at heart; “More and more carnivals are trying to go honest these days, but they’re falling on their own swords. An honest carnival is like a lion without teeth, a bird without wings, a fish–”
“A fish on land?” the boy said, from on top of a ladder, where he was gluing new feathers onto what were labeled as the wings of Pegasus. From below, Griffin laughed.
“That’s right!” The power of a carnival, he explained, was that everything was a lie. For a carnival to thrive, the truth couldn’t be allowed to get a breath of air. “Did you know that in other countries a carnival is a religious festival?” Griffin said.
“No,” said the boy.
“It’s true,” Griffin said. “Carnival is the season of excess before Lent. When the churches realized they couldn’t rid us of our pagan ways, they invited us to have five days of merriment before the lean times. But not so in this country, except in Louisiana—you’ve never been to Louisiana?”
“I’ve never been anywhere.”
“Down there they have it special, but not most other places. That’s why instead we have carnivals all the time—traveling amusements, carnivals that never end but just move on, move away, down south in the cold winter months, up north during the hot summertimes. Which is it now?”
“It’s summer.”
“Of course. But it’s always carnival somewhere in America. Do you know what the word means? From the Latin, carne vale—’a farewell to the flesh.’ Figure out what that means and you’ll know everything there is about this business. Every con, every trick, every rigged game and kootchie girl’s wink, that’s all it is: a farewell to the flesh.”
“Yes sir,” the boy said. He didn’t really understand, but he had the feeling that was just as well–better, maybe.
The boy cleaned, polished, swept, sanded, hauled, tied ropes and mended tent flaps, and most of all he listened . Sometimes the talk was about Griffin’s life before the carnival, his time studying medicine before he dropped out, his time in the war, his time traveling, meeting Cooger, all of it.
Rarely did he talk about what the boy wanted to hear most, which was the woman in the cabinet. Not where she’d come from or how he’d come to have her, and certainly not how she was made–for whenever he wasn’t standing in front of her, the boy imagined she MUST be a fake, in spite of what Griffin said.
But how? You couldn’t make taxidermy of a human the way you could an animal, not without everyone seeing the seams–nor could you embalm a body so perfectly that it would stay unspoiled for all this time in the hot summer air. (These things the boy knew because he’d pressed questions on the town undertaker, who had looked quite uncomfortable with his queries but gave his answers all the same.) But nothing artificial could look the way she did–it was, as the old man said, a mystery.
Other times–mostly the times Griffin unlocked the cabinet and let him look her in the eye–he was content to believe the old man’s story and that she was really real after all, and even that she was aware of everything around her, if not exactly alive. He imagined she could see him each time–that she was happy he was there, even. Was it possible? No–but it WAS undeniable.
She was a goddess, the boy knew; not one that anyone had ever named or prayed to or built a shrine for, but a goddess all the same, and he’d be her priest if she allowed it. When she swam in lazy circles of the sea those hundreds of thousands of years ago, or when her eyes, which glittered like flecks of gold in the sand of an undersea beach, had fallen on the treasures in those long black underwater shadows, she could never have imagined this is where she’d end up.
“Is she in the cabinet or in the sea?” he asked one night, not really sure what he meant.
“This is a sea,” Griffin said. “Inside are all the secrets of every ocean, a world greater and more beautiful than we’ll ever see. It’s her kingdom—when she lets us see her, that’s her royal visits.”
And when the boy looked into her eyes, he thought that was true too: Those eyes had seen things he couldn’t imagine. If only she could talk to him, he thought…but maybe she could? Maybe it was just her prerogative not to.
***
The season began to turn, and the carnival crowds grew thinner. Most of them had spent everything they intended to, and they began to cast dark looks in the direction of the fairground. Still, the boy came every night that he could, and the times that he couldn’t—when his father somehow failed to pass out at an early hour—he didn’t sleep, but instead lay awake and thought about her.
In his mind—was it a dream? He couldn’t say, although he always felt that it happened during waking—they were together, finally, and she no longer had a tail but instead beautiful long legs and a woman’s body, streaming with water. “Isaac,” she told him, reaching out to twine her long arms around him and draw in close. “Love me. Love me.”
Her coral lips met his, and in that kiss there was desire that the boy had never known. She wanted to see, Griffin had said, but no, that wasn’t it; she wanted to EXPERIENCE, the land, the people, the world, all of it. The boy was from the land, and so, in his way, he was what she wanted.
He was naked, and their bodies wrapped around each other. Daring to touch her, the boy’s hands wandered over the glistening perfection of her bare skin; he’d imagined she would feel like marble, like a statue of the goddess that she was, but instead she was soft, smooth, and somehow cool. The first kiss was like a warm, deep sigh, the second was like electricity, and the third was like a feeling of falling and never coming up again.
They drifted together in an endless sea, the waters cool but their bodies hot. Her mouth and lips warm and alive, and he grabbed handfuls of long, streaming hair and pushed his lips down her body. The waters around them turned deep blue.
The woman kissed the boy’s body with a million tiny caresses of her mouth, both of them writhing together in the abyss. He reached around to cup her rear in both hands as her legs spread wide open and encircled him. He sucked on the dark points of her alert nipples, and she pushed him harder into herself, so that their bodies could join and never separate.
They were every part of each other, touching, stroking, squeezing, caressing, until the woman trembled and shook, overflowing with gasps, thrashing her head from side to side, fingers clawing at bare backs and mouths meeting, melting into kisses, then retreating only to catch one another again, cool skin warming and then heating and then turning white hot.
Panting and giddy, the boy let her close her legs harder around his body and splay her hands across him, the pads of her fingers teasing the sinews of his chest as she lowered herself down and slipped him inside. She clenched around the smooth, hard sensation of his upright cock right away, and the pair of them clung to each other as she started to ride him, her thighs flexing up as she kissed him as hard and deep and long as she could, her wet hair surrounding them both.
For the first time he wondered how it was he wasn’t drowning under the waves. Then he realized that he was, but it was okay—he was drowned in the moment, the sensations, the need, the longing. She was overwhelming him, pulling him down, dragging him under, but it’s where he wanted to be, where he needed to be. Just as much as she waned to see the world, he was desirous of this place in the ocean, the hidden paradise of her body, her kiss, her love, her everything.
But he did struggle now to keep up, even as she kept going faster and faster and they sank deeper together. The waters turned dark now, black almost, and they seemed to be closing in all around, and the boy felt a flutter of panic even as the first shocking spike of orgasm hit him and he felt himself open up and release. Everything was going black now, everything drawing in around them, until–
He woke (or snapped to, if he had been awake already) with a start, and sat up in his bed until the beating of his heart finally slowed. When the cold night air drifted through the drafty house, it chilled his naked flesh. Both the boy and his bed were damp—almost soaking wet in fact.
Must have been sweating, he thought. But when he remembered the feeling of the woman in his arms and the refreshing coolness of the water as she pulled him down and then felt those cloying wet spots again, he couldn’t help but shiver. They didn’t look or smell like sweat; they smelled of seawater, and the scent clung to him all the next day.
That night, in the old dark tent, Griffin looked over his ledger book again. After he crossed every T and dotted every I and counted every nickel, there wasn’t much to show for it. Closing his book, Griffin sighed and said, “Well, summer can’t last forever, can it?”
The boy, who was sweeping, looked up and said, “Sir?”
“In a day or two, I imagine, we’ll be on our way–the carnival, that is. Meaning I have a lot of work to do to make this attraction road-ready once more.”
The boy’s heart sank, but he worked hard not to show it, only to nod and attempt what he thought of as a stoic look. “Summer can’t last forever.”
Leaning back in his chair, Griffin looked at the boy as if seeing him for the first time. “And you?”
Still clutching the broom, the boy said, “I guess I need to start thinking about…I don’t know what. Whatever I’m going to do with myself.”
“No great plans, then? School? Work? The army, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” the boy said, without much enthusiasm. He felt tears ready to fall, but he fought them back; it wouldn’t be right to cry here in the tent, he felt somehow. It would have been a kind of sin.
Griffin appeared to consider this, and then almost casually he said, “What about travel? Am I wrong to imagine you have some appetite to see America? Every state in the union?”
The small hairs on the boy’s arms stood up. “Sure, someday–if I ever have the money for that kind of thing. If I ever have any money at all.”
“Mm. Well there’s no sense playing games about it: I’m not as young as I used to be, and there’s work to be done on this attraction that I’m not suited for anymore. You already know the job and the carnival, and–well I’m not going to say that it’s an easy life, you know, town to town, year in and year out, working the marks all the time. But it’s not without its rewards: It’s a higher calling, in its way–the one true American religion, and we her apostles, the devil help us all. In any case what do you say? Don’t pretend you haven’t been thinking about it.”
The boy’s hands tightened on the broomstick. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes sir.”
Griffin looked him up and down, just the way he had the first night they met. “That’s good then,” he said. “Do you have any business you need to take care of? Family or that?”
Shaking his head, the boy said, “Nobody but my father, and that’s better off without goodbyes.”
“Put that thing down before you give yourself splinters and go take the rest of the night off,” Griffin said, taking the broom. “When you get home, pack as many things as will fit in a sack, and make sure it’s light when you’re finished.
“And then…think. Really think about what it is you’re doing. When tomorrow comes, if you still want to, come back here and we’ll take care of the particulars.”
The boy knew that he didn’t have to think about it–or more precisely that he’d thought about it every night for long enough that he knew very well all his thinking was already done. But even so he followed Griffin’s instructions; packing didn’t take long–the sack wasn’t even half full when he finished, and yet it contained nearly everything he owned.
Rather than sleep to the sound of his father’s drunken snores (the older man wouldn’t be awake again until well after noon the next day), the boy climbed up onto his roof and watched as the night slowly faded into a rose-yellow dawn that glistered like gold on the tin roofs of every shack in the neighborhood. That color made him think of another thing that Griffin had told him: that money, and the act of it trading hands, was also a sacred thing–maybe THE most sacred thing. At every temple ever built, people had given coins in exchange for–for what? For humbug, Griffin would say, for hokum. Every church was a carnival at heart, a place of willing cons.
The boy stayed up there for much of the day, fell asleep briefly, woke up sunburnt and felt foolish, and found that he couldn’t stand to wait any longer, so well before sundown he grabbed his sack and, barely aware that it was for the last time, he went out. When he got to the fairgrounds, the attraction was closed early, and Griffin was waiting for him–and, the boy saw with a start, he wasn’t alone: He had the secret cabinet open, and SHE was waiting for him too, with her aqua skin and shining scales and bare breasts; she watched with eyes like shiny pennies as he slipped into the tent flap.
He was barely aware of Griffin, even as the old man took the bag from him. “You’ve decided then?” he said, but the boy didn’t answer with words. His feet shuffling, he walked toward the cabinet, drawn toward the woman’s stare and the ever-so familiar impression of water splashing somewhere.
In the flickering lantern light, the boy made out the supple curve of the woman’s lips, that thinnest of all smiles. His hands were shaking; he couldn’t stop them. “‘Sirenus Oceanus,'” Griffin said. “The siren of the seas. Not that she’s much for singing–but you hear her song anyway, don’t you?”
The boy did indeed imagine that, just like in his dreams. He even imagined that she was reaching out for him now, waiting to draw him into a cold but comforting embrace. Without thinking, the boy pulled off his shirt and let it fall to the ground. He kicked his shoes away too, not bothering to pay attention to where they landed. He knew the old man was still watching, but it barely crossed his mind.
“Of course you hear her: That song brought you here in the first place. Not everyone hears it: only the very special ones. She’s like me that way, always on the lookout for the rare, the strange–the truly one-of-a-kind.”
The boy was naked now, and the pleading of those outstretched arms brought him right to the precipice of the display; he was going to fall into those waters and straight into the arms of destiny. He imagined in that secret ocean it must be warm and inviting, and the sacred waters traced a line down every glorious curve of her body.
“You’re the pearl in the oyster,” Griffin continued. “Is that the song you hear? What are the words in your heart? What has she composed now, just for you?”
Just how deep did the waters go? He imagined diving in and the two of them swimming forever, down into those strange depths, where it might be dark but where they could see to eternity. Just a little further now…
It was only the slightest pause, a blinking interlude in the allure of the spell–but it was enough, perhaps, for the boy to finally notice what he’d never seen before in that face, those lips, those eyes, the grasping hands before, something that had always been there but had, somehow, simply never crossed his notice. When the mermaid looked at him, it was with affection, yes, and with longing too, but that longing was laced with something deeper and more profound:
Hunger.
The boy tried to scream, but there wasn’t time: All at once, she sprang forward, reached out of the secret cabinet and, wrapping her arms tight around the boy, she pulled him back into the darkness with her, and they both disappeared. Somewhere far away was the sound of a splash in distant waters, and then…nothing.
On their own, the doors shut; on its own, Griffin’s key turned in the lock.
And that was all.
***
The carnival left town the next morning. It might return next summer, but nobody could say for sure; nobody could even be sure if the town would be here for another summer. That was the way of things.
Dr. Cooger’s Museum of Human Oddities, Scientific Curiosities, Medical Marvels & Experiments of Nature left with everyone else. Despite the size of the collection and the tremendous challenges it presented, Griffin packed up everything on his own in just a few hours, and moved even the heaviest exhibits with ease, despite his age. If anyone else had been present, they might have thought that the old carny looked better now than he had in some time: Not younger, exactly, but stronger, more potent, less worn-through than he had when they first arrived in town.
But nobody was there to notice; the other carnival folk always kept their distance from Griffin, and from his tent.
Which meant nobody was around to witness the last thing he did, which was to take an old sack that was half filled with a young man’s clothes and a few meager personal trinkets to a quiet place on the edge of town, dig a hole just a few inches deep, and bury it.
There had been a time in his life when he’d have done something solemn to mark occasions like this, but all he did this time was leave two pennies in the minor grave, kick enough dirt over it that it wouldn’t be found for a week at least. And then, before he left, said just six words, that nobody but the wind heard:
“Carne vale–farewell to the flesh.”
Summer couldn’t last forever. But there was always a younger summer on the horizon, if you just kept going toward it.