chickens and iced lemonade and hot-buttered corn-on-the-cob, maybe even elephants and the dirty straw from the monkey cages, too.
But he did not let himself go, even though a funny, sing-song voice in his head was saying, Aw, kid, don’t be such wet blanket! Can’t you smell the circus and the carnival and the fair in August? Don’t you know the fun you’re missing? It’s all out there, it’s all waiting for you and all you have to do is simply roll with it like the others…
No, Chuck was not rolling with it.
Maybe the others were. Maybe they didn’t know that there was something deranged and perverse about all this, but Chuck did. He knew danger when he smelled it and he was smelling it now like the acidic fumes from a battery that was about to explode in his face. He felt it up his spine and along the back of his neck and down deep in his stomach in a thick, expanding mass that made him want to throw up. But maybe the others didn’t and maybe they were so damn scared inside, they were afraid to admit to it. For what could be dangerous about such things? What possible hell could there be in the smell of sweets and junk food?
But Chuck knew.
Because sweets worked on kids, didn’t they? That’s why perverts offered them to kids so they’d get into their cars. Kids liked things like that…carnivals and fairs and circuses and popcorn and hot dogs and cotton candy. Good fun and games and sugary things. And maybe those sweets tasted good when you shoved them into your mouth, but when that dark, evil car rolled to a stop in the shadowy woods and you were dragged screaming into the trees, smelling the vileness of your host, feeling his or its hot breath in your face, those eyes like dirty coins appraising you like fresh meat and you smelled the sour rot of his breath…well, the kiddie games were over, now weren’t they, boys and girls? Now comes the touching and the defilement and the juicy blackness that would tear your soul out in bloody, soiled chunks?
“No!” Chuck shouted.
The others stopped their daydreaming and their respective fantasy trains ground to a rusty halt. They were all looking at him, thinking he had lost it now. And Maybe he had. Maybe he had at that. And how could he really explain to them that if they kept rolling with this one, they’d roll straight off the biggest fucking cliff they could ever imagine?
They all just stared and he couldn’t seem to find the words to make them understand.
He knew what they thought about him.
He knew what all the kids at school thought about him.
He knew they despised him. Oh yes, despised him. That was the word. Because Chuck Bittner was a braggart, he was overstuffed and full of hot air and superior and uppity. Chuck always bragged, always. My dad did this and my dad did that. We own this and we own that. My dad bought me this and my dad bought me that and we’re going to Cozumel and Disneyworld and I have three new game systems and my own checking account…and what do any of you have? You have nothing compared to me because I’m better than you, richer than you, oh so much more important than you. That’s the way they all saw him and he knew it and he always had. Oh, he pretended he didn’t know how they hated him, but he knew. That’s why some nights he woke up, unable to breathe, because he knew he was alone, terribly alone. They hated him and he had no friends but the ones he could buy with daddy’s money. And sometimes it was just too much, like being the only mouse in a snakepit, knowing those kids would kill him if they could, do just about anything to cut him down to size.
And now they were all staring at him like he was crazy.
Sure, he was a little spoiled brat and he knew it at that moment like never before. He saw himself as he was and he hated himself, too. Really, truly. And that’s what made this all even harder, because they would never believe him.
Never understand that there was danger ahead.
That he knew things they did not.
And that funny sing-song voice said, You’re a spoiled rotten little bastard! Ha, ha, ha! That’s all you are and daddy can’t help you out here! He can’t buy you out of this, now can he?
Though he was numb from the chill water, Chuck was sweating profusely, feverish and just sick about who he was and what he now knew. “Listen to me,” he said. “Please just listen, okay? I know you guys don’t like me, but listen to me. You’re not really smelling those things. It’s all a game, you see? Something out there wants to draw us in. It’s using these smells to get us to go out there where it’s waiting…”
3
“He’s tweaked,” Cal said.
“Had to happen sooner or later,” Kyle added.
Chuck fought for the words to adequately express himself. He wished Bobby Luce were there, because he was good with words. He would have made them understand. Sure, those smells were getting stronger now for Chuck, too, but once you accepted the fact that they were not real, they started smelling like other things…like closed-up, mildewy places and wormy corpses and blood bubbling from slit throats.
“Listen!” Tara said. “Do you hear that? Do you?”
They all began to talk at once, but Chuck could not hear them. He could only hear the tinny, rising melody of a calliope, the sort of thing that always provided the background music for merry-go-rounds.
“There’s gotta be some kind of fair out there,” Brian said.
“It’s nuts,” Jacob said, denying it, yet pleased at the idea.
The music kept playing, the rain falling off to that cold, windy drizzle again. The seven of them stood there up to their waists in that filthy water, smelling not sewage and backed-up pipes now, but sweet things and salty things, and the music played on…so wonderful, so inviting. The clouds even parted and a soft down of moonlight lit up the world, washing everything down with a ghostly luminance.
“Look!” Tara cried out. “Over there!”
“A clown!” Cal said. “A real clown!”
And they all got very excited, calling out to him, even though Chuck warned them not to. Because maybe he was the only one who really saw what was standing under that department store canopy, something hunched and wormy and foul.
Then the clown was gone.
But Chuck had seen it. What it was and what it was not.
“C’mon,” he said, barely able to control the terror inside him. “We better go back the other way.”
But Cal laughed in his face. “Why?”
“He’s losing it,” Kyle said.
“No, listen to me?”
But they did not want to listen.
“Maybe the clown can help us,” Tara said.
“Yeah, he’ll know the way out,” Mark agreed.
“Sure,” Cal said.
But Jacob just stood there. “I don’t know…I don’t really like clowns.”
Which got the Woltrip brothers laughing and Chuck wanted to laugh, too. He felt the laughter bubbling up from his belly, because it really was funny, wasn’t it? The absurdity of this situation? The seven of them standing in that reeking water in a flooded, deserted part of town seeing clowns and hearing calliopes and smelling cotton fucking candy? Hee, hee, hee, it was hilarious!
“He’s right,” Chuck said, trying to get a hold of himself. “That’s no clown…it’s…it’s a monster! Like those things that tried to get in the bus!”
“Tell him to stop,” Tara said, the fear encroaching on her now, too.
“Yeah, shut up, faggot,” Cal told him.
“I’m going to talk to that clown,” Kyle said.
He started moving off and Chuck grabbed him and then both Kyle and Cal shoved him away and he went down, sinking into that cold, stinking water, and rising up quickly, gagging. “You…you can’t go!” he told them.
Then just in front of them, a wave of water moved past like something big had skimmed by just under the
