Frantic, he drives to her apartment — an address he shouldn’t have, because she didn’t give it to him, but which wasn’t particularly hard to find. He told himself just in case at the time. In case what? This, he thinks, hunched forward, windshield wipers struggling to keep up with the rain. He parks catty-corner to the curb, leaves the car door hanging open, takes the stairs two at a time. He pounds on Marian’s door, not expecting an answer, and eventually he kicks it in.
The windows are open. Rain blows in and dampens the sill. The air smells faintly of mildew, as though it’s been raining in Marian’s apartment for a very long time. She could be out, visiting friends, on vacation, at a Christmas party, but Walter knows she isn’t. He goes through Marian’s apartment, room by room.
The clothes in her closet and her drawers, the towels in her bathroom, the bed sheets, the curtains — every bit of fabric in Marian’s apartment has been carefully knotted and left in place.
Under the scent of mildew is the lingering odor of lightning and popcorn.
And Marian is gone.
On New Year’s Eve a stray firework ignites a blaze that burns the library to the ground.
“Follow her.” Walter’s mother calls him in the middle of the worst ice storm in memory.
It’s New Year’s Day plus one. His mother’s voice is slurred. It’s dark, and Walter can’t work out whether it’s from ice coating the windows or the time of day. His bare feet kick empty bottles as he fumbles toward the bedside clock and its ruby light.
“Mom? I can barely hear you.” Walter’s tongue feels thick, as though he’s trying to shape words in a dream. Maybe the dwarf will show up soon and tell him how Laura Palmer really died.
“Go after her,” his mother says. Walter grips the phone.
“I don’t know how. Mom?”
There’s a hush like static. Like a secret world of rain. Like ice freezing on the telephone line sealing up his words. His world.
“Go.” His mother’s ghost voice is buried under a fall of not-snow. The line dies. As it does, instead of a dial tone, Walter hears the murmur of a calliope.
It is January 4, 2016, and Walter awakes from a dream.
It must be a dream.
It is a dream because he enters the carnival with no invitation, only the evidence in his hands — the poster, the shirt, the film, the postcard, the Polaroid, the notes. He is allowed in. Even though none of the invitations are for him. They are for Charlie Miller and Melissa Anderson. They are for Lemuel Mason and Marian. But not him.
Unless, taken all together, they are. Evidence numbers 1 through To Be Determined — case files, half-vocalized conversations, newspaper articles, microfilm, archives, cigarettes smoked, and alcohol consumed. Perhaps these are Walter Eckert’s invitation to step right up, come on in.
It hurts. And Walter will never admit this.
What has he been chasing?
It has to be a dream.
Walter passes through the turnstile, evidence clutched in his hands — the photograph, the film reel, a reproduction of the shirt, the standing stone, the Neanderthal man. He holds them out to a blank-eyed boy at the ticket booth who waves his hand and makes the gate standing between Walter and the carnival disappear.
Walter steps inside.
The boy, no longer blank eyed, runs ahead of him. Walter follows, hurrying to keep him in sight. No older than thirteen, the boy is naked, loping on hands and knees between tents staked into the dusty ground. Skinny. Faint bruises trace the ladder of his ribs, the knobs of his spine. Walter almost remembers the boy’s name. But every time he opens his mouth to speak, it slips away.
Down narrow ways. Between tents pulsing with breath, buzzing with the sound of tattoo needles, humming with the burr of electricity and the importance of a honey-producing hive. Walter is utterly disoriented.
There!
When Walter catches sight of him again, the boy wears a wolf’s head in place of his own — muzzle frozen in a snarl, glass eyes reflecting the glow of the pale fairway lights.
Fried crickets served here. Ten for a dollar, all skewered up neat and crunchy in a row.
Skin of mice. So nice. Peeled fresh and heaped with shaved ice. Drizzled with any flavor syrup you want.
Try your luck, Ma’am-Sir. Prizes no worse than your heart’s desire! Careful what you wish for. At-any-cost is a steep price to pay.
Walter almost loses sight of the boy again as he ducks into a tent. Walter follows.
Seats rise in concentric circles from the center ring. A spotlight, dusty-dim, pins the boy, who throws his head back and howls. The sound is muffled inside the echo chamber of the wolf’s skull.
In the spotlight there is no mistaking the bruises — dark purple scars that will not fade numbering his ivory bones.
The boy crouches and the light snaps off. Wolves, real wolves, who bear no human skin, creep between the seats, which are full now. The rabbit-masked audience holds its collective breath, leans forward. The wolves ignore them, dripping slow between the seats. Trickling down. The boy curls in the middle of the ring. Skinny, scarred arms wrap around the taxidermied wolf’s head. He waits.
Walter can’t bear to watch.
He flees.
And stumbles into another tent with a single man, a clown, spotlit in the center of the ring.
The clown stands behind a table, stitching. His eyes are downcast, covered in crosses. He works with infinite care, unpicking seams and redoing them, crooning softly all the while. A lullaby. The needle goes in, the needle comes out. The thread is a form of weeping, one that won’t smear his makeup, joining rust-colored bone to gleaming fish scale. The child’s skull is exaggerated, swollen. A hairline crack runs from brow back to somewhere Walter can’t see.
There are other tents, other exhibits. A woman rides a bicycle. Her legs churn the pedals, turn them insistently. Blood flows. Walter traces it from the wheels to her heart, to her legs, to her arms, and back again. Her skin is translucent. The bicycle, too.
A flock of crows follows her around the ring. If she slows, the blood will stop moving. If she slows, the birds will swallow her eyes.
Walter runs, on and on. Faster through the carnivaclass="underline" through the fortune-teller’s tent where tarot cards chase his heels like fallen leaves, past the world’s strongest man, the living skeleton, the ring toss game. He is looking for something, someone. A woman whose eyes are inkwells, whose spine is a card catalog, whose skin holds the tales of a thousand library books lost and burned. He needs to tell her he’s sorry; he needs to take hold of her hand.
But all he finds is a snake woman — half mechanical, half flesh and blood, selling lies for twenty-five cents a go in a sawdust-filled ring. All he finds is a surgeon with a silver mallet and a scalpel in his hand. A band of seven old women and three old men, playing flute and drum, xylophone and horn, with each other’s bones.
The exhibits are endless. They smell of popcorn. Cotton candy. Lightning. Eternity. Walter keeps running, but he never arrives anywhere. There is always another corner, some trick and fold of the carnival, keeping him close but at bay. After all, if there’s no audience, no one there to observe just outside the ring, how can the show ever go on?
It is a dream. It must be a dream. It doesn’t matter that his boots are sitting beside his bed in the morning, caked with dust when he left them neat and clean on the mat beside the door before going to sleep. It doesn’t matter that his hair smells of greasepaint. It doesn’t matter that his palm remembers the touch of a librarian he didn’t have the courage to reach for across a table spanning the gulf of a thousand years.