Midnight Under the Big Top: Tales of Madness, Murder, and Magic by Publications Cemetery Dance & King Stephen

Author:Publications, Cemetery Dance & King, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Published: 2023-07-06T22:00:00+00:00

Mr. Bones,

Wild Ride

by Billy Chizmar

Every autumn, for three days and three nights during the month of October, the Peddler Brothers’ Carnival came to Jericho, Maryland. For as long as I could remember, the carnival arrived a weekend or two before Halloween, opening its gates for business on Friday afternoon and packing up its tents and rides and leaving in a long, dusty caravan of big trucks on Sunday night. My parents once told me they’d taken me every year since I’d been born.

The carnival was a big deal in Jericho, especially for kids. There’s not an awful lot to do around here besides going to the movies or high school football games. My older brother played on the team, or at least I think he did. I’m not sure anymore. He always came to the carnival with us, too, usually with some of his older friends. Heck, pretty much the whole town showed up. It was one of the only times people around here came together like people are supposed to.

Each year, the carnival set up in the same spot, a big grassy clearing called Runnals Field, right behind the Baptist church. On opening night, my family walked around the whole field, getting “the lay of the land,” Dad always said, which really meant checking out which rides we wanted to go on so we knew how many tickets to buy. The best rides usually came back year after year, including my all-time favorite, The Whirly Dirly. It looked like a big metal Frisbee that you sat down in, and once you were belted in, it started spinning really fast and tilting up and down. I think I saw something like it once in that old movie The Sandlot that my brother likes so much, but unlike the guys in the movie, I never puked on it. Actually, I’m pretty brave when it comes to rides. I like them all, even The Zipper, which my dad refuses to go on.

There is one ride I never liked and made a point to avoid: the mirror maze. Not that there’s anything scary about mirrors, I mean I have one back home in my bedroom and every bathroom in the house, but I never liked the big sign that welcomed customers near the entrance to the maze. All the attractions had hand-painted billboards up front, right next to the ticket collector booth, and most of the signs featured really cute animals or cartoon characters—but not the mirror maze.

Instead of a fluffy, pink bunny wearing a top hat or a goofy old man riding a unicycle, the mirror maze sign was painted black and had a big skeleton on it. It didn’t look anything like the posters in the nurse’s office at school or at my doctor’s office. It was too weird for that. The bones on the skeleton’s body were tiny and skinny, and there were fingers and toes missing as if someone had forgotten to paint them on. The bones weren’t even white, but closer to brown or gray.

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