This is it, Walter thinks, without ever knowing what it might be. The air shifts, and for just a moment the scent is salty-sweet, popcorn and candy apples, and it tastes like lightning.
Whatever it is sweeps past him, leaving the aftertaste of electricity on his tongue. The date flashes across the screen, and Marian’s expression finally changes. Her mouth makes an O, and she raises a hand to cover it.
“What.?” Walter says. And, “No.” He reaches for her, but it’s too late. When Marian brushed his knuckles, that was the moment to take her hand.
“Wait,” he says.
Marian is past him, her shoulder striking his so he’s off balance. He follows just in time to see the cab door slam.
There are puddles on the street, reflecting stoplights and neon, and the night smells of freshly departed rain. The cab pulls away in a cloud of exhaust and ruby-burning headlights. The faint sigh of a calliope hangs in the air. Walter raises his hand, but the cab doesn’t slow. What was he thinking? What has he done?
Walter returns to the library the next day. He asks after Marian, and the young man at the desk presses his lips into a thin line before telling Walter Marian isn’t here today. But he cuts his eyes toward the frosted glass office door without meaning to as he says it, so Walter scribbles a note on the back of an old circulation card, before shoving it into the young man’s hands.
“Just give her this for me, will you?”
It’s only two words: I’m sorry. Walter stations himself at a table, surrounding himself with books and drifts of paper. After twenty- three minutes, Marian emerges. She is polite, but closed. She brings him books, helps him find articles buried deep in the archives room, but doesn’t linger. He watches her, but the wild creature of paper skin and inkwell eyes has vanished. Slipped around a corner. Disappeared. Gone.
Perhaps he imagined it all. Perhaps he’s made a fool of him- self and hurt a woman who wanted nothing more than a friend.
“Marian. About last night. ” he says, as she lays a heavy tome of town records beside him.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” Marian’s lips press into a thin line identical to the one worn by the young man behind the desk when Walter asked after Marian. Is there a school that teaches librarians that expression?
Walter’s hand hovers in the space between them. He lets it drop even before Marian turns. The subject is closed.
Confused, uncertain, Walter retreats behind his own wall. Stories of the disappeared and unexplained surround him like birds coming to roost, like carnival tents rising from the ground.
There is the story of three men and seven women vanishing from their retirement home, leaving in their wake doctors and nurses who can only speak backward from that moment on.
There is the story of an opera, performed only once, telling of the beheading of St. John at the request of Salome. The lead singer walked off the stage halfway through the final act and was never seen again. The lighting rig above the orchestra pit detached while the baffled audience was still trying to sort out whether the departure was part of the show, and the conductor was instantly killed.
There is a bone pit in Pig Hill, Maryland. An ossuary in Springfield, New Hampshire. The entire town of Salt Lick, Indiana, which, in 1757, simply disappeared.
Walter studies. He combs news articles, conspiracy websites, birth and death records. He consults any and every source he can. He doesn’t know whether he’s chasing something, fleeing something, or trying to hold something back.
Walter dreams, and sometimes he’s trying to catch Marian, sometimes he’s trying to outpace her, and sometimes, he’s running scared.
This is what Walter Eckert knows from the research he’s done: There are never any advertisements of the carnival coming to town. There are only stories reporting where it once was before it vanished, packed up, moved on.
This is what Walter Eckert knows deep in his bones: If you are not invited, you cannot attend. You will not be invited unless you would give up anything, everything, to have the carnival steal you away.
This is what Walter Eckert doesn’t know: Does he want it badly enough?
From January 1983 to May 1985, Melissa Anderson, one of the top accountants at Beckman, Deniller & Wright, quietly embezzled nearly two million dollars from her employers and their clients. On the sixteenth of June 1985, Beckman, Deniller & Wright received notice of an impending IRS audit.
On the seventeenth of June, Melissa took the elevator to the thirty-fourth floor of her office building, and climbed the fire stairs to the roof. She removed her jacket and folded it neatly by the door. She slipped off her shoes and placed them beside her jacket. In her stocking feet, she climbed onto the building’s ledge. The wind tugged her blouse and hair. She looked down at the traffic on Market Street below.
In that moment, she could conceive only of the fall. Her muscles forgot how to turn around, walk to the door, descend the stairs. Elevators didn’t exist. If she wanted to get back down, she’d have to jump. And she was terribly afraid.
She told the wind, “I don’t want to die today.”
Perhaps the distant notes of a calliope reached her. Perhaps it was simply the way the birds turned, a scattered flock of pigeons appearing much larger and more sinister as they banked away. Or it was the scent of popcorn. Candy apples. Sawdust. The flicker of lights lining a fairway.
Whatever it was, Melissa remembered how to turn around. She climbed from the ledge and tore the delicate soles of her stockings as she crossed the roof to reclaim her shoes. She put her jacket back on, rode the elevator to the ground floor, and instead of returning to her desk, she walked three blocks to the university museum.
Melissa Anderson did not return to work the next day. Or the day after.
On the twentieth of June, the car carrying the IRS auditors to the firm of Beckman, Deniller & Wright was struck by a city bus. The driver and all three passengers were killed.
The next day, the carnival left town.
How long does it take to fall in love? Seven minutes? Five hours? Two months, fourteen minutes, twenty-six days?
Walter catches his gaze drifting to Marian as he reads of the lost and disappeared and it gets harder and harder to look away.
Maybe it isn’t love. Maybe it’s only that he missed her when she was sitting across from him, so distant he couldn’t bear to take her hand.
Maybe it’s only that he knows he lost her the moment he asked about the Miller family instead of telling her about the hushed, connected world of held breath, psychic predictions, telephone lines, and rain.
The fourth piece of evidence. Well, no one’s really counting anymore, are they? There is a postcard of a standing stone in Ireland, carved with Russian characters. There is a blurred Polaroid showing a body frozen into a chunk of ice, scribbles on the back in pencil indicating there exists forensic evidence dating it from the 1760s, though its brow is sloped like a Neanderthal’s. There’s a handwritten set of coordinates leading to a planet no one has yet discovered. All delivered in nondescript envelopes, no return address, bearing Walter’s name.
Whatever the evidence, it is always the same. The carnival enters town, the carnival leaves town. People disappear.
As the clock ticks over from December 13 to December 14, 2015, Walter Eckert wakes in a panic. It’s Marian. Marian is gone. Of course she’s gone. Because the invitation was never meant for him.