As my lips meet his for a second kiss, I think maybe saying good-bye isn’t all bad.
Maybe it means I’m making room for someone new.
It was a dark carnival. You know the drill. Evil clowns lurching out of the shadows, blood on their puffy white gloves. Tattered Big Top, blowing in a hot summer breeze. Insane giggling children running in and out of the shadows. The hall of mirrors that throws back terrifying, distorted reflections. The tattooed man whose tattoos move and crawl on his skin, the merry-go-round that turns back time, the bearded lady who comes at you with a carving knife, and the fortune-teller who gives you only bad news.
You know, your basic dark carnival. You’ve seen a thousand of them in movies or on television, read about them in books, heard about them in song lyrics. But you probably don’t know as much about them as I do, given that I grew up in one.
Yep, that’s me. Lulu Darke, only daughter of Ted Darke, the owner of Ted Darke’s Dark Carnival of Mystery, Magic, and That Which Is Better Left Unseen. My mom died when I was little, and my father raised me, traveling the country with the carnival. Mostly small towns where the inhabitants like a good scare. Summer’s our best time, when the nights are hot and restless and couples want an excuse to cling to each other in either of the tunnels—the Tunnel of Love or the Tunnel of Terror, depending on their mood. The rest of the year is when we hole up somewhere, do our hiring, and I take my high school courses online.
Some people might think it’s weird I don’t have friends my age. My closest pals growing up were the bearded lady and Otto, the strongman. Most people stereotype strongmen as being dumb, but Otto’s a borderline genius who reads Proust in the original French and taught me geometry when I was ten. All I’ve ever needed is the carnival and my dad.
That was before this May, when my dad packed up and disappeared.
Not that I wanted to think about that right now. We’d just arrived in a new town. It was Saturday night, our first night open, and the place was packed. We’d spread out in an open field, close enough to town that you could walk to us but not so close that anyone would call in a noise complaint.
Horrible screams were coming from the Big Top, which meant the show was going swimmingly. Melvin the Moaner was taking tickets. He didn’t really have any talents besides moaning in a ghostly way, but we kept him on anyway, out of kindness.
Despite the satisfied crowd, ticket sales were slow. They had been for a while now, since before Dad vanished. He’d left behind a note on a Hallmark card covered with balloons. The note said he owed money all over the country and he had to run. Don’t blame yourself, he’d said. Don’t expect to hear from me. And I hadn’t.
The only thing keeping the carnival afloat was an infusion of cash from my uncle Walter, my dad’s older brother. He’d been the one running the fair until he’d married a rich woman with a teenage kid and settled down into a life of stable mediocrity. The one time I’d met Walter’s stepson, he’d eaten too much cotton candy and thrown up on me. That was ten years ago.
Now we were running on borrowed cash and Walter’s promise that he’d show up soon and help bail us out. His wife had died, and apparently he was eager to get back into the carnival business. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. All I knew was that my family business, my dark carnival, was on the verge of going under. No wonder my nails were bitten to the raggedy quick.
“Lulu.” It was Ariadne, the sexy mermaid. She was out of her tank for the night, wheeling around the fair in her motorized chair. “Reggie’s got the flu. He needs you to take over in the Tunnel.”
“Terror?” I asked.
“As if Reggie has ever stepped foot inside the Tunnel of Love.”
I groaned. I was engaged in my preferred job, manning the Snack Shack. You might think evil clowns would put people off their food, but it’s the opposite. Being scared makes people hungry, just like it makes them want to make out with each other’s faces. We sold a ton of snacks, including funnel cakes, sugar-skull lollipops, neon-colored cotton candy, and bright red slushies MADE WITH REAL HUMAN BLOOD!
The blood was just corn syrup, but whatever. People ate it up, metaphorically and literally.
“Can’t you do it?” I asked.
Ariadne flapped her tail and gave me a meaningful look.
Reggie’s job was to lurk in the shadows and jump out at people with an earsplitting shriek. It was exhausting. I sighed. “Fine. But I’m taking a slushie with me.”
* * *
Even though I knew I was on my way to a sucky job, my spirits lifted as I crossed the midway. Summer was in the air. Summer, my favorite time of year. I loved the hot nights, the smell of popcorn and bug spray, the occasional breeze that would lift my hair and cool my neck. I loved jumping in Ariadne’s tank during the daytime, when the carnival was closed, and sunbathing out on the grass with a book.
I saw people giving me odd looks as I ducked into the Tunnel entrance. They probably thought I was breaking in to vandalize it. We didn’t have uniforms at the carnival, but even so, my black eyelet sundress, spider-pattern tights, and Doc Martens didn’t exactly scream “I work here!” Also, I’d recently dyed my hair in rainbow stripes, mostly because my dad had always forbidden me to dye my hair, so it was a way of flipping him the bird now that he was gone.
I navigated through the Tunnel, keeping to the employee area, where the machinery whirred and the floor was greasy with oil. Through the wall I could hear marks—sorry, customers—screaming as they enjoyed their jolting ride through darkness, where luminous piles of bones glowed on either side and vampires, ghouls, and demons leaped out to grab at their moving carriages.
The carnival had always been Dad’s life. I remembered him talking about it to me when I was little, his eyes shining. “People come to shows like ours to be scared, yeah. But they also come to live. To feel magic. No regular hick circus will give you that. They come to feel brave, like they’ve faced the dark forces.” He tugged on my hair. “There are some shows out there that don’t know when to stop,” he’d said in a more subdued voice. “They say if people want darkness, even if they think it’s make-believe, give it to them. But the price you pay for that kind of evil, Lulubee … that’s a high one. I say, if people want darkness, give them shadows cut with sunlight.”
“Scary and funny,” I said. “Like clowns.”
He’d laughed and ruffled my hair, and I’d thought that we were the most important things to him, the carnival and me. But he’d taken off on us without a second thought, and we were both showing the effects. I hadn’t been sleeping or eating, really. I kept waking up with nightmares of the carnival being repossessed, the pieces carted away, and me left in an empty field with a couple of unemployed evil clowns.
Unemployment is no joke for carnival people. It’s not easy to get another job—there just aren’t enough fairs like ours anymore. Everyone who worked here was like family to me, even Mephit, the scaly demon who lived under the Big Top. And my whole carnival family was depressed: Ariadne wouldn’t stay in her tank, the acrobats were always drunk and couldn’t walk the tightrope, Otto was too bummed to lift weights, and Etta, the bearded lady, had alopecia, which was making her hair fall out. Only the clowns were happy, and that was because they had fallen in love with each other and were cheerful all the time, which is the last thing you want from clowns who are supposed to represent everyone’s worst nightmares.
My mood had plunged back down into the basement.