Nightmare Carnival

Because right now, Walter’s entire world is made of wanting. If he really went to the carnival, he would still be there, wouldn’t he? If they invited him in, asked him to stay, dear god, why didn’t he?

And more importantly: How will he ever get back there again?

CORPSE ROSE

by Terry Dowling

Not counting the viewports in whatever Apollo CSMs were attached to it during its short active life, Skylab only had the single window in its main wardroom. And when the mission crew finally departed in 1974 and the first US space station was officially abandoned in space at last, the light of Earth shone through that window for more than five years before the station fell from orbit in July 1979, lighting a chill silence broken only by the vagaries of temperature and the occasional peppering of microparticles against the hull, sounding in whatever unvented gases remained, in many ways the noises most human habitats make. For a time Skylab became the newest kind of haunted house, though all stories of the face peering in that solitary window — and, worse yet, peering out — are merely that, stories, with no possible basis in fact. But peering in or out, it is one of the world’s oddest supra-urban myths: this notion of a face in the wardroom window of Skylab before it fell and, yes, as it fell.

— Heinrich Fleymann

The day Jeremy Scott Renton turned eleven, a circus ran away to join him.

Not all at once, mind, but the thirteen members of the Corpse Rose Heirloom Carnival and Former Circus (to give it its full name) came to check him out and give their approval, arriving secretly in their ones and twos, never making a fuss, never drawing too much attention. They stayed long enough for the troupe to gather once more, doing the usual mufti work in bars, stocking supermarket shelves, cleaning swimming pools until they had finally assembled, all thirteen, then confirmed him as theirs and them as his, and went their various ways again.

Every single one had to approve, of course, theirs being one of the seven great lost and hidden carnivals of the world. Things were done differently in the Heirloom Carnivals, or the Sly Carnivals as they were sometimes called — and the Corpse Rose Heirloom Carnival and Former Circus followed the old protocols to the letter.

As for Jeremy Scott Renton — Jem to his friends — he wouldn’t learn that it had happened at all for another twenty-five years, eleven days after a carefully placed operative persuaded both a doting grandmother and fond older sister in Perth that a round-trip ticket on the Indian-Pacific and a week at Cottesloe Beach would be the perfect birthday gift for a thirty-six-year-old grandson and younger brother just back from five years with the Australian Design Council in London. The Indian-Pacific running from Sydney to Perth via Adelaide was one of the remaining great train journeys in the world, all 2,698 miles of it, and it seemed like a grand idea.

Jem had five weeks’ leave owing and was glad to spend part of it with his west-coast kin before settling down to his new posting. He thoroughly enjoyed the Sydney to Adelaide leg of the journey and had every expectation of enjoying the longer haul across the vast Nullarbor Plain as well. Outback Australia was one of the no-time, slow-time places of the world and, by association, so too was the inside of the Indian-Pacific when it made that crossing.

It was when the train made its customary stop at the not-quite-ghost-town of Cook, 513 miles northwest of Port Augusta in the middle of the Nullarbor, population anything from four to fifteen on an Indian-Pacific day, that what had been set in motion twenty-five years before reached the end of this particular recruitment phase, and the next part of the old Sly Carnival spell that had planted the seed of an idea with grandmother and sister was engaged.