Carnival Macabre by Cassandra L. Thompson

Author:Cassandra L. Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798985128574
Publisher: Quill & Crow Publishing House

Yes. There in the rickety cabins which line the northern shore of the bay. Tourist housing. Here today, gone tomorrow, and taking their nightmares with them. Windy voices direct her. If their sixth sense prickles their dreams in a wave like electricity, the boys will awake. If they turn to the window, they will see an elderly woman with frightening eyes in an antique Edwardian dress. Wild white hair fans around her head. She will be holding the window frame. Her mouth will move as she urges them to invite her in. Like her prey, her kind has solved a great many problems and can do a great many things with its own version of technology. Yet at this point, the Lamia (among other names for them) must still be invited to cross the threshold. For a moment, frozen in instinctive fear, the children will realize the horror, comprehend that they sleep on the second floor and thus, no human should be standing outside their window. They will scream and save themselves. But Alexandria knows her business, and neither child awakes as she softly reconstitutes from a shadow. She gazes for a moment. Hunkered deep in their pile of blankets, Ambrose and Ruben look like cherubim. Alexandria salivates. Softly, weaving her song into the wind, she sings:

…Came stealing through the Dusk an Angel Shape

Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and

He bid me taste of it…

The eldest child stirs, slowly kicks himself free of the blankets, and sleepwalks to the window.

While the Rose blows along the River Brink,

With old Khayyám the Ruby Vintage drink:

And when the Angel with his darker Draught

Draws up to Thee—take that, and do not shrink.

“Granny?” the child says from sleep.

“Yes, my love,” Alexandria responds, and she repeats, “take that, and do not shrink.”

“Will you sing ‘The Muffin Man?’”

“Of course, my sweet.” But she would do no such thing. The nursery rhyme contains a powerful incantation against evil.

“Amen…” the child mumbles, and unlocks the window. He climbs back into the big bed with his younger brother.

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep;

And Bahrám, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass

Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

Now the children will sleep through anything.

She kneels by the bed, and slowly uncovers their feet. The boys have plump, soft, pink feet. They lead soft lives. Alexandria’s jaws unhinge. Her long tongue slithers out, splits, and a crystalline globule, like a drop of dew, forms on the end of the stinger. It falls tear-like to the elder boy’s foot (Ambrose?) She gives it a moment. Now that part of him is numb. The stinger is white and clean as ivory as she stabs the sleeping child between the big and second toe, and drinks.

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