Nightmare Carnival

A SMALL PART IN THE PANTOMIME by Glen Hirshberg

Ah, there’s our Africanist,” Bemis says over the rim of his gin glass, through his beard, as Jalena Russell enters the outsized office. The other four, who’ve apparently been there awhile, look up from their drinks or turn from their bored perusals of the Great Douglas Green’s legendary bookshelves. Over by the window, Alexa Frazee even nods.

Jalena stops. She can’t help it. She knows that what she hears, every time they greet her that way, isn’t what they mean, or even what they’re thinking. What she hears is in the word itself.

Africanist. Our African.

“Professors,” she says, and drops her messenger bag into Green’s ratty recliner, where it half disappears into one of the fissures in the dry leather. Its color was probably burgundy, once, but now almost matches Jalena’s skin. A romantic — Jalena, perhaps, when she’d first arrived at Eastern Montana U. — Great Plains as an assistant professor seven years ago — would have identified the smells rising from it as properly aged whiskey, decades-old conversation. What it actually smells of is mildew, old nicotine, trapped fart.

Abruptly, Rogan and Frazee, the Lit and Comp department’s one and only functioning couple, lurch from the windows where they’ve been watching the snow and move straight toward Jalena. Rogan tilts back and forth, making frothy sounds through the floppy rubber lips of her drugstore zombie mask and bouncing a hand in the sprayed-on streaks of red in her spiky gray hair. Frazee just stretches her arms straight in front of her, bracelets jangling, her surprising smile lighting up her face under her gypsy scarves. She is the only person Jalena has met at EMU — GP with a smile that bright, and the closest thing she has to a favorite, or at least a mentor.

“One of us,” they are chanting. “One of us.”

“Hey, that’s right,” Bemis says, looking up from the Wallace Stevens first edition he has carefully removed from Green’s shelves. “Hear, hear.” His beard stirs like rabbitbrush in a breeze, and it’s possible that he smiles. Then they’re all chanting, even the Great Dr. Green behind his desk, almost as if they’re genuinely happy about her promotion, or, to be fair, even care one way or the other.

“Hear, hear.”

“Congratulations, Jalena. Tenured Professor Jalena Russell.”

“Tenured Full Professor Jalena Russell.”

“One of us!” Rogan and Frazee chant. Rogan sticks out a hand for a shake, but Frazee engulfs Jalena in a jangling hug that almost feels natural, for a second. At least, it does to Jalena, who has never exactly been a natural hugger herself.

Then Rogan joins in the embrace, which just seems strange, awkward, until finally, over Jalena’s head, Rogan and Frazee kiss. Jalena can feel their elbows and hips and breasts, as well as Rogan’s rubber mask, and wants to squirm free. At the bookshelves, Bemis lowers his gaze back to his beloved Stevens. Behind the desk, meanwhile, Green leans his formidably flabby self forward over his dog-eared Faulkners like the molting mushroom he is and grunts his disgust. Instantly, Rogan and Frazee release Jalena, join hands, and spin toward him. Rogan clamps a palm on Frazee’s ass atop her tricolored skirt. Frazee smiles, and Rogan glares through the eyes of her mask.

“You’re both going to hell,” Green murmurs, with no heat, as though reciting a line.

“And you can’t come,” Frazee says.

At the window, Darlene Parrott lets the curtain settle and leans her short, blond hair against the wall. Her face is so pallid and tired, she looks like an old, framed portrait of herself. For Halloween, atop her usual gray sweater and darker gray woolen ankle scraper, she has tied a yellow scarf with cat faces on it. She pushes her pince-nez up her nose.

“It’s still snowing,” she murmurs.

“And it’s going to snow,” Bemis says — almost sings — and the rest of them groan.

Green slaps his palms on his desk. “Bemis, if you insist on quoting Mr. Stevens and his blackbirds at us, you’re going to have to put my book back where you found it.”

“Philistines,” Bemis mutters. “And there’s only one goddamn blackbird.”

Even Parrott lets a smile — or a reflection of everyone else’s smiles — flicker on her pale face.

“Any kids out there yet, Darlene?” Frazee calls, snatching the gin bottle out of Bemis’s hand. She pours Jalena some in one of Green’s moose-head shot glasses.

Parrott leans between the curtains again, peering down at the entrance to the Humanities building, where the MFA students none of them teach — this being the Lit and Comp end of the hall, where the rhetoricians and studiers of story lurk in their quieter offices, as far as they can get from the tellers of story — have constructed their contribution to the annual Clarkston, Montana festival of haunted houses. All they’ve managed is a thatched hut this year, draped in black crepe paper and black paint. Inside, grad students in black sweatshirts and face paint have tucked themselves among the shadows, waiting to slither up from the floors or climb down off the walls, whisper in a little kid’s ear, maybe cop a feel from a classmate.

Before she came to Clarkston, Jalena had heard tales of this day in this place, had been told it was a reason for staying, cause for celebration that she’d won her first tenure-track posting on the northern plains instead of the Texas Panhandle or southern Indiana industrial wasteland. But her Montana Halloweens have proven a disappointment, to the town even more than to her, as far as she can tell. There are fewer haunted houses every fall, more evangelical Christian postings decrying the holiday. More frat parties where obsessively ripped boys in Tarzan loincloths swing out of their reeking rooms to sweep up drunk coeds in nurse or hot-witch costumes.

“Fewer little ones every year,” Parrott says, the tenor of her voice even flatter and sadder than the one she uses in conversation or class. “Where do they go?”

“Have Stanton’s grandkids been by, at least?” says Green, through a mouthful of the Saltines he keeps next to his gin in the bottom drawer of his desk. According to Frazee, he’s also got a box of photographs in there that he has never let any of them see. There are no pictures on his desk or the walls.

“Dean Emeritus Stanton?” Jalena asks.

When Frazee laughs, her arms jangle, and her gypsy scarves ripple atop her dark curls like light on a night river. She is the happiest compositionist Jalena has ever met.

“Don’t look so shocked, Professor Russell. The man was Halloween hardcore.”

“I heard he hates this place.”

Bemis stirs enough to reclaim his gin bottle. “He hates the university. The glorified vocational school our budget cuts have left us with. Not Clarkston.”

“Clarkston, too,” says Green, cracker chunks spilling down and into his flannel shirt front. “Now, anyway. Without the university, what’s to like about Clarkston?”

Frazee puts an arm around Jalena’s waist, the gesture casual and easy, and again, Jalena wonders how and where and when people learn to do that.

“Back in the day?” Frazee says. “When the whole town did this holiday right? So long ago that Dean Emeritus Stanton could still bend down with both knees? He and his wife constructed this huge maze every year in their front yard.”

“Made of straw.” Rogan sounds angry, as usual, though she appears to be smiling under the mask. “A crawling maze. I used to go through it scared to death.”

“It was full of centipedes and spiders. Real ones.”

“I hate spiders,” says Jalena.

Frazee just smiles wider, which seems wrong, somehow, not like her, though Jalena couldn’t have said why.

“Yeah, well, I told you. Hardcore.”

It’s Green, this year, who does the honors, bangs his glass down on his desk and splashes gin all over his Faulkners. His white, flabby wrists squeeze through the buttoned cuffs of his shirt like toothpaste through crumpled tubes.

“To David,” he says, “wherever he is.”

“To David,” the rest of them echo, the rhythm precise, practiced, instinctive, even Rogan answering right on cue, though she generally makes it a point of honor to respond to nothing else Green ever says.

It’s like the Lit and Comp program fight song, Jalena thinks, even as she raises her glass along with them, feels her mouth move over the name of this person she knows nothing about except that he vanished, years ago.

“To David,” Parrott says, just after the rest. Then they’re all knocking back gin, except Frazee, who can no longer drink. She sips her seltzer, lets the smile fade off her face.

“Wherever he is,” she says.

“Such beautiful inflections,” Jalena says, quietly. “Or are they innuendoes?”

“Hey, hey!” Bemis perks up, refilling his glass just so he can tip it at her. “No wonder we gave you tenure. I told you you’d come around to Wallace Stevens. I could tell the moment we hired you that you were a woman of taste.”

At the desk, Green half groans, half burps, like a bullfrog. “Lord Christ. That’s all we need. Our Africanist’s ways of looking at a blackbird.”

“One of us,” Frazee starts again, adding a halfhearted zombie arm wave, and stops. “Very possibly the last of us.”

That is all too true, Jalena knows. For once, EMU — Great Plains seems determined to get ahead of an educational movement: the one to end tenure. And that makes it all the more likely that for better or worse, and for the foreseeable future, she’s staying here, now. One of them: these people she’d been sure would finally be her people. Her friends, colleagues. Lovers, maybe. What, in any English department she’d ever seen or been part of, had led her to believe that?

“Wait, that’s right,” she says abruptly, and puts down her glass. The gin tastes foul in her mouth, burnt cinnamon over old flowers. “I’m tenured. I’m official. And that means—”

“That you’re officially fucked,” Rogan mutters. Her mask flutters with the force of her breath.

“—that you have to tell me,” Jalena finishes.

For a second, they look baffled.

“The David Roemer story,” she reminds them. “You told me, on my very first Halloween here, that when and if I got tenured, you’d. ”

What stops her? Not the look on any of their faces, but the way they exchange the look, passing it around just ahead of her gaze like something they’re hiding behind their backs.

“She’s right,” Rogan finally says.

“She is,” Green agrees.

Green and Rogan. agreeing?

But Frazee steps forward, bracelets jingling, right to Jalena’s side. As though shielding her?

“Jalena neither wants nor needs to hear that story. Ever.”

“Don’t speak for me,” Jalena can’t keep from snapping, despite the fact that she trusts Frazee, or almost does. “And yes I do.”

“You don’t,” says Parrott.

Amazingly, Bemis has come off the wall, and he’s almost steady on his feet. His smirk seems to be for Frazee, though he doesn’t quite look at her. “Of course she does, Alexa. Who wouldn’t, after all?” Already, he’s shrugging into his overcoat, the only one Jalena has ever seen him wear, with the lining leaning out of the filthy green fabric as though peering between buttons. “It’s time, after all. We did promise.”

“Goddamn it,” says Frazee, “this isn’t funny.”

“We’ll take my truck,” says Bemis, pulling on gloves, and he’s gone from the office.

With startling speed — so quickly that Jalena hardly has time to process that it’s happening — they’ve all donned their coats and scarves and moved across the English hallway, down the linoleum steps under the bare-bulb lights, and out onto the quad. Her colleagues have formed a sort of phalanx around her, are hustling her into the night, which is warm for the end of October. Snow swirls around their uncovered heads but vanishes before it hits the ground. Firefly snow. They pass the haunted MFA hut. Inside it, some kid — a little girl, judging by the voice, too young to be in there, and Jalena wonders what her parents could be thinking? — lets out a shriek, then a laugh. The grass all over campus is dead and brittle from yet another summer of lots of lightning and no rain, and it crackles under Jalena’s boots. The buildings are utilitarian concrete blocks, haphazard in their very occasional architectural filigrees — Doric columns outside Business-Econ, a flashing light sculpture by the student union — and about as college classic as parking garages. And yet, this place feels closer to home than anywhere she has lived since she left South Carolina for college. Maybe anywhere, ever.

Her colleagues are moving with surprising speed; even Green huffs along behind, like a rhino escaped from its pen.

“Hey,” Jalena says, trying a laugh.

“Come on.” Frazee has Jalena by the arm. “Let’s get this over with. Maybe we need this.”

Jalena doesn’t know what this is, exactly, or who we are, for that matter. And she trusts Frazee less than she thought, doesn’t like everyone closed around her, sweeping her along. The Great Plains moon blazes too bright, as usual, and too low on the horizon, like a searchlight on a prison tower. Apropos of nothing, she thinks of her drunken mother — dead before Jalena even got the scholarship that freed her from the Piedmont — hanging sheets outside their glorified shack. Up on the splintering, nail-spiked wooden boards that pass for a porch sits Jalena’s drunken, unemployed ex-poet father, who will die in a drunken car wreck hours before he was meant to hop the train Jalena had paid for to come see her graduate magna cum laude. He’s clicking discarded oyster shells in time to the Jessie Mae Hemphill groove on his one-speaker boom box. She can hear that groove, still, and those clicking shells. In a way, she supposes she misses those sounds. It has never before occurred to her that she could miss one single thing about South Carolina.

Not until they’re all the way across the quad and have reached the edge of East A Faculty Lot do Parrott and Rogan step aside and allow Jalena to see where they’re going. Bemis has already reached his truck and opened the back of the bed. In disbelief, Jalena watches Parrott—Doctor Darlene Parrott, ten-petal evening star cultivator, closet Rex Stout fanatic, sound-poet scholar, poster professor for academic spinsterhood — crawl right up and settle against the steel siding and hunch into her coat. Her thin, birdlike face disappears into her cat scarf too quickly for Jalena to see if she’s smiling.

“You’re kidding. Right? We’re riding in that?”

“Like the football team,” Frazee says. “Cruising the strip.”

“Like the whole badass front line.” Rogan’s whoop sounds almost strangled through the mask. She half helps, half drags Jalena up into the bed.

Turning, wondering vaguely how they’re going to manage, Jalena starts to offer Green her hand. But of course, Green won’t be riding back here; he’s already clambering up in the cab next to Bemis.

Eastern Montana. Where even academic men think they’re men.

The motor starts, the metal bed vibrating beneath Jalena’s feet. Her colleagues have already settled in their spots, so quickly that Jalena wonders if they’ve actually done this before.

“Better sit,” Frazee says, grabs Jalena’s wrist, and tugs her down.

Then the truck judders out of the lot, off campus onto West Main. The wind — feeling much less warm, downright freezing once they’re in motion — roars over the top of the cab and through them. All at once, Jalena breaks into a laugh. A real laugh, one she hasn’t intended or considered first.

“I haven’t done this since I was. ” she starts. Then she grins. “I’ve never done this.”

She expects Frazee to grin back. But Frazee, seated to Jalena’s right, only shivers and nods. Parrott, on Jalena’s left, actually pats her gloved hand like a grandmother or a nurse.

As they hit the center of town, Bemis slows. The truck crawls past the Beast of Burden Pub, which serves the town’s only microbrew, and the Prairie Dawg, which is just a flat-out, get-drunk bar. Then the Double Ice sundae stand by the train station. During Jalena’s first Halloweens here, every one of those places was packed from twilight on with screaming, costumed revelers fresh from haunted houses or gearing up for the darker, scarier late-night haunted houses. Everyone telling stories. Shouting and laughing. And there are still people out tonight. Some. The church crews have strung themselves out on either side of Highbottom Road like a picket line, passing fliers to drunk college kids, waving signs. As Bemis’s truck rumbles past, one sweet-faced, wrinkled old man holds his picket high so Jalena can read it.

“And you will know what Fear is. ” There’s a verse number, too, though Jalena doesn’t catch it, and she doesn’t recognize the quotation.

North of the church crowd, she sees the usual clusters of drunken college kids, though if anything, they seem more subdued than on ordinary football Saturday nights, clumped around streetlamps, holding out hands or tongues for the snow as it evaporates around or on them. There are very few families. The oversized CLARKSTON CENTER PEDESTRIAN DISTRICT: 25 mph STRICTLY ENFORCED sign outside the Prairie Dawg has been shot full of holes. Red ribbons dribble from the holes, as though the sign is bleeding, or licking the air.

“Okay, that’s cute,” Jalena says. “I guess.”

Then she catches sight of Leo Hutchinson under a streetlight. Leo is her favorite current grad student. Even tonight, he’s wearing the white shirt and tie he dons for every single day of class, like no other boy from the Montana Hi-Line. It makes complete sense to Jalena. Somehow, Leo survived growing up black and small and scholarly and not gay — it would have been easier for everyone, more comprehensible, if he were—and escaped the Hi-Line. Of course he would want to remind himself, every day, that he was no longer there.

But now, Leo gapes, stares, as his entire doctoral advisory team judders past, shivering together in the bed of a pickup. The moment is mad, magical.

“You know,” Jalena blurts, “I kind of love this.” She feels a burst of gratitude as startling and cold as the wind whipping by. And it isn’t just gratitude; she’s also amazed. I’m here, she thinks. I’m tenured, and I’m staying. And I’m on an adventure.

“God, David loved this,” Parrott murmurs, gesturing at the street or the air.

The truck turns, and just like that, Highbottom is gone, and everything and everyone left that makes Clarkston a unique place disappears along with it. They rumble down the frontage road that parallels the freeway, past the brand-new Walmart and the Costco and the used-truck lots toward the edge of town.

“David Roemer,” Frazee says.

“That fucking moron,” says Rogan, but not the way she would have uttered those words about Green. Or to Green, for that matter.

Almost like she misses the guy?

“We can still stop, you know,” Frazee says, and Jalena turns to find her looking at her hands, pushing rings up and down her long, thin fingers, which still twitch, sometimes, years after Frazee claims she last had an actual drink. “I can make Bill stop and let you out. He’ll listen to me. There’s no reason for this, except his need to. ”

Her voice trails away. Jalena shudders as the wind whistles down the throat of her jacket and through her suddenly insufficient sweater. She glances at Parrott, who just looks entranced by the moon, and shakes her head. “It’s okay. I’m. excited, right? Or, I should know about this, anyway? Shouldn’t I, if I’m staying here? Since I am, I mean? You all seem to—”

“He came many years ago,” Parrott murmurs, in her classroom voice. “David Roemer. When we were, all of us, young, or younger.”

Jalena is surprised that she can hear Parrott so clearly over the wind. She also understands, now, why students sometimes compare her voice to a ceiling fan. There is something insistent, and mournful, and soothing, in Darlene Parrott’s sort of quiet.

“And pretty early in his time with us, he got word of our favorite local legend. The Dark Carnival.”

“Mr. Dark’s Carnival,” Rogan corrects. Her mask flaps, and she yanks it flat.

“I’ve never liked that ‘Mr.,’ ” Parrott hums. “It’s out of rhythm.”

“But it’s what it was called. You can’t just change it because—”

“I can.” Parrott’s smile is sudden, private. “I teach poetry.”

Rogan grunts, and Parrott continues.

“But David. He was a historian through and through. At least back then. And like any good academic, he set out to prove, once and for all, that Clarkston, Montana’s favorite story was just that: a story. Not a real thing. And then, one terrible, frigid Halloween night — in his tenure year, dear, same as you — his lover—”

“Meaning, the grad student he was fucking,” Rogan snaps.

Frazee clucks at her, reaches across the truck bed, grabs one of Rogan’s hands, and strokes it, as though comforting a skittish cat.

“He loved her,” Frazee says. “I don’t even think he realized how much.”

“He loved her,” Parrott says.

“Okay, okay.” Rogan’s eyes flash under the eye holes as the rubber skin ripples against her face.

“For Christ’s sake, take that thing off,” says Frazee, still stroking her hand.

Rogan does. Her own face, underneath, is pale but also blotched red, like a newborn’s. She pats the spikes in her hair, looks down at Frazee’s hand, and holds on.

“It’s warmer in the mask,” she says.

“On that fateful night,” Parrott drones on, “David’s lover led him out of town, onto the prairie.”

“That’s not what happened,” Rogan interrupts again. “That’s not how I heard it. I heard he found tickets at—”

“Sssh,” Frazee quiets her. She quiets.

“And far out of town, way out in the frozen prairie grass, David Roemer finally found the Dark Carnival. Or, his Dark Carnival, anyway. And he came back changed.”

“Only it wasn’t the Carnival that did that,” Frazee tells Jalena, but she’s not interrupting, not like Rogan. Her voice, in fact, is a substantially muted version of her usual, laughing trumpet blast, as though she’s harmonizing around Parrott’s melody. “That was also the night his lover died, remember. That’s what changed him.”

“One of the things,” Parrott says.

The two of them exchange that look again, their secret look. And again, Jalena experiences unspecified misgivings. Maybe Frazee is right, and she really doesn’t want in on this particular secret handshake.

“How did the lover die?” Jalena asks.

“She was murdered,” says Frazee.

“Shot,” says Rogan.

“By Roemer?”

“Listen,” Frazee says.

For a moment, Jalena thinks Frazee might take her hand, and almost wishes she would. But Frazee doesn’t. The truck turns down a wooded side street. The surrounding trees mercifully cut the wind. Instantly, the occasional noise from the freeway fades. There are small, bungalow-style A-frames and ranch homes tucked back under poplar trees on tiny lots. The houses have to be half a century old, maybe more, and yet they look temporary as trailer homes, somehow. A fluke of prairie town life Jalena still hasn’t adjusted to.

Parrott has gone right on talking. “At the funeral, David gave the eulogy. He talked only about his lover’s life. He said nothing about the Carnival. Not there. Not until the very end. And then — when he was just standing at the front of the Methodist church on Highbottom, quietly crying — he suddenly held up a packet of folded papers he’d withdrawn from his pocket. ‘I loved you, Kate,’ he said.”

“ ‘I love you, still,’ ” Frazee echoes, as though this were a poem, or a childhood lullaby they all know.

“ ‘I will follow,’ ” Rogan finishes. Her participation surprises Jalena, even before she looks up and sees tears in Rogan’s angry blue eyes.

“And when they closed the casket,” Parrott continues, “David placed those papers inside with her.”

“What were they?” Jalena asks, and now she’s surprised by the sound of her own voice: defensive, as usual, but softer, too. Or younger?

“That’s just it. No one knew. Not then. But they obviously meant something to David. Because three days after the burial, he—”

“Oh, shit, what’s he doing?” Frazee snaps, head jerking up as though she’s only just noticed that they’ve turned off the frontage road. Clambering over Jalena’s legs, shoving bracelets up her arms under her coat, she bangs on the back of the cab. “Where are you going, Bill? You’re not going there. Stop!”

But when the pickup does stop, at the bottom of a leaf-littered lawn strewn with dead dandelions and rusting toy Tonka trucks tipped on their sides in the too-long grass, Frazee leaps from the bed before Bemis has even cut the motor. He starts to open his door, and she shoves it shut and glares through the window at him.

“Bill, no,” she says. “Why? Why bring any of this up for her?”

It’s the way she says it, not what she says, that finally reveals the source of one of the rip currents Jalena has always sensed running through the EMU — GP English department, and never understood. Frazee and Bemis — alcoholics, student-centered teachers first instead of researchers, amazed modernists who still love the language like the high school book nerds they must have been — have always seemed such natural allies. And aren’t.

Because they’d been married, once. Bemis was the husband Frazee had left for Rogan. Of course he was.

I am a baby, Jalena thinks, with the same stab of self-doubt that always accompanies that thought. At thirty-six. I have a doctorate, a tenured position I spent twenty years earning, and no functioning relationships of consequence. I know and understand nothing.

Somehow, Bemis has slipped from the truck. He eases Frazee back into the leaves, which close over her feet like the dark surface of a winter lake. “It just seems like we should ask, at least,” he slurs. Gently. Almost lovingly. “Don’t you think? Since we’re really going out there.”

“Why are we going out there, Bill?”

For a moment, they stay frozen, reminding Jalena of automated figures on some mechanical tower clock. His hands on her wrists, her feet in the leaves, dark hair sneaking out the side of her scarf to fly loose in the late-fall wind. Their bodies are limned in orange from the candlelit jack-o’-lanterns lining the driveway of the little wooden A-frame across the street. They stand that way long enough that Jalena thinks he isn’t going to answer, and then he does.

“I guess I still think we owe him. Don’t you?”

He lets go and starts across the yard. Frazee lets him.

A few houses down the block, where the trees lean closer over the asphalt and the houses seem to stir on their dark lawns like tumbleweeds about to tear loose, Jalena sees a group of trick-or-treaters. There are a few parents, maybe half a dozen kids. They hurry up a driveway, through tree shadows onto a lit porch. Jalena can hear the doorbell, can see the kids’ mouths moving. But their voices stay so hushed, Jalena can barely hear their trick or treats. It’s as though they are part of that mechanical clock, too. Automated, and out on their timed, yearly rounds. Leaving the house, they pause in the middle of the street and huddle, watching the truck, waiting for them to leave. As though Jalena’s little group might pose a threat. The thought is almost funny. The Lit and Comp Crew, escaped from their university tower, out to terrorize the townsfolk on this one, terrible night.

It would be funny, Jalena thinks, if even one of her colleagues were laughing. But Parrott and Rogan are staring across each other into opposite corners of the yard they’ve parked beside. Green is a motionless, bullfrog-shaped hump in the front seat. And Frazee is still ankle deep in leaves, watching Bemis clamber up the dark steps, rap on the door, ring the bell of this particular house, which has no jack-o’-lanterns on its porch, and no lights inside or out. He picks a piece of stuck something off the screen and stares at it, then returns, slowly, across the grass, looking down at what he’s taken. As he passes Frazee, he hands it to her, and Jalena gets a glimpse. A little torn, pink piece of stiff paper.

“What’s it say?” Jalena asks when Frazee just stands there, looking down.

“Mit ne,” Frazee murmurs. She crumples the paper in her hand and stuffs it in her pocket.

“Is that some kind of—”

“Admit One.” Frazee ignores Rogan’s offered hand, clambers up, and resumes her seat next to Jalena. “Before it got ripped—used, presumably — it said Admit One.”

“To the Carnival?” Parrott gasps. Her gloved hand dives into Frazee’s pocket, pulls out the ticket. But Frazee laughs, grimly, even before Parrott smoothes the ticket in her palm.

“To the Eastlake Plaza Cineplex 6, I think. Taken 2. 9:45 showing.”

Parrott stares at the ticket, then up at Frazee. “Why was it stuck to the door?”

Frazee shrugs. “Because Maddy Roemer is starting a collection? Because she sensed we might show up, and thought she’d have a little fun?”

“Because she’s a clever, nasty little biker bitch?” Rogan says. Angrily.

Or. no. protectively?

“How about because she pulled it out of her pocket accidentally when she was getting her keys to get back in her house? What do you think about that?”

“Maddy Roemer?” Jalena asks. “He had a wife, your history professor? Was this while he had his grad student lover?”

“Sister. Maddy is his sister.”

“And she owes you,” Rogan says, in that same, adamant tone, as the engine starts up.

Frazee just looks at her hands, or the bed of the truck. “Yeah,” she says.

The truck has completed its U-turn and returned to the frontage road. The wind blasts over them again. And Rogan, Jalena sees, has tears in her eyes.

“Have you seen her, Alexa? Since, I mean?”

“Seen her,” says Frazee.

“Spoken to her?”

“To say what?”

Then all of them, even Parrott, go silent for a while. The new Walmart flashes past, closed but all lit up. Then the airport. Atop the freight terminal, billowing and flapping as the wind buffets and blows through and then abandons it, a gigantic, black, inflatable Halloween something tilts into the night, leaning almost off the roof over the road. At first, Jalena thinks it’s some sort of giant bat or a Godzilla. But it turns out to be. actually, she doesn’t know what it is. A shape, in an inflatable cowl. Like one of those Harry Potter dementors, if that’s what they’re called. Like a monster costume with the monster sucked out of it, rooted to the terminal roof like a flag.

They all stare at it. Rogan, the closest to it, actually shrinks away. “That’s new,” she says.

Then they’re past the last Clarkston buildings, veering away from the freeway onto the local access road that cuts through the plain, following the feed trucks and the moonlight west toward the far-off mountains.

“Those, too,” Frazee mutters a minute or two later, as they rocket by the second, then the third of the scarecrows, propped up on fence-post crosses next to each passing speed limit sign. Their faces are identical: white circular pillows with stitched black Xs for eyes, and no other features except clown noses. Their straw forms have been stuffed into matching overalls and striped flannel shirts that look too soft and comfortable to be work shirts.

Pajama tops? Jalena wonders, as yet another scarecrow appears in front of and then vanishes behind them, its stitched-shut gaze aimed across the road, out at the prairie. Not at them. Surely not.

“Wow,” she says, trying to pull her scarf tighter against her neck without unfolding her hands from across her chest. “Are those meant to be funny?”

Through the window of the cab, she can see Bemis and Green noting the scarecrows, too. Their heads turn sideways in time, then away in time, back toward the unspooling road ahead.

“Maybe we should go home,” Frazee half whispers.

“Three days after the burial,” Parrott resumes, as though someone has flipped a switch and triggered her again. “That’s when it really started. Alexa, you were there, weren’t you? The day David Roemer came back to work?”

“I was there,” Frazee says. Jalena expects her to pick up the story, but she doesn’t. Parrott continues.

“He came in completely covered, hair to shoe soles, in dirt. And he was waving his papers around. Those papers. You understand?”

Jalena doesn’t, at first, and then does. Though she thinks she must be wrong. “Not the ones he—”

“Yep. Those,” says Rogan.

“The ones he’d buried with his lover,” says Parrott.

“It was all pretty Dante Rossetti,” Frazee says, and Rogan snorts.

“Or Burke and Hare.”

“He showed them to us. He was already more at home with us, in the English hallway, than the people in his own department. Or maybe he just thought we were less likely to label him insane.”

“Yeah,” says Rogan, “because he figured we already were.”

“What were they?” Jalena asks. “The papers.”

“His handwritten list,” Parrott says, as yet another clown-nosed scarecrow — and another — flashes past. They look less pinned to than draped over their posts, like neighboring ranchers calling to each other across the road. Creatures of the plains.

“Handwritten,” Jalena feels herself murmur, in Parrott’s cadence.

“The list he’d compiled on the night he found the Carnival. The night his lover died. A list of everyone he was absolutely certain had been there, or claimed to have been. Not just on that specific night in that particular place, either. He’d listed everyone he’d ever heard of or talked to, in all his time in Montana, who claimed to know something about it. Mr. Dark’s Carnival, you see, it comes and goes. Moves around. That’s always been the story, anyway. ‘This is my life’s work, now,’ he told us. ‘I’m going to find them all. Every single person who’s ever so much as seen that place. And then I’m going to find the Carnival. Because that’s where I’ll find her.’ ”

“Her? Her who?”

“Ah, yes. Forgot to mention that part, didn’t you, Darlene?” says Frazee. She looks up at Jalena, her teeth chattering behind her scarf. The expression in her eyes is not friendly. And for the second time since her colleagues spirited her out of Green’s office, Jalena wonders if she’s being had. Or hazed. Or worse.

“What part?” she says.

“Just one crucial little detail. David Roemer’s murdered lover? Well, it turns out — we learned this days afterward — that she’d been killed Halloween afternoon. Roughly six hours before David claimed to have driven with her to Mr. Dark’s Carnival, and then left her there.”

“What? Are you telling me he killed her?”

“I didn’t say that. When did I say that? In fact, no one, as far as I know, has ever said that. She was killed around two o’clock, apparently, while he was still in class.”

“And he loved her,” Parrott adds.

Jalena doesn’t know how to answer or what to say. She waits for Frazee to grin, for Rogan to burst out laughing and yell trick or treat or one of us.

But all Frazee says is, “Right. Now that that’s straightened out. Carry on, Darlene.” And she goes back to burying her face in her collar and looking at her hands as the truck plunges deeper into the prairie night.

“Find the Carnival. Prove to himself what he’d seen. Find his lover. That’s what David Roemer set out to do. He was gone a lot, after that. He did show up at school, sometimes, to teach his classes. Actually, he showed up for most of his classes, at least at first. But only because most of the people on his list — even the ones he managed to find — refused to talk to him. More than one threatened to get a restraining order if he didn’t stop phoning or appearing on their doorsteps. More than a few called the university to complain. The History department issued him a series of reprimands, then official warnings. Then they held a panel — Green was asked to moderate, in order to ensure the least possible departmental shenanigans, because it turns out the History people are even more petty to each other than we are.”

“Which you wouldn’t think possible, unless you’d seen them in action,” Rogan mutters. “Green. Jesus.”

“The panel met for three days, heard testimony, and conducted peer review of David’s pile of disorganized, largely incomprehensible notes, which he claimed was going to form the core of the most revelatory volume of eastern Montana history ever written. In the end, they declared Professor Roemer’s entire course of research invalid. They recommended that he seek psychological help. They directed him to propose new projects and show evidence of progress on them immediately. And they threatened to strip him of his tenure.”

“Can they do that?”

“We’ll never know. Because David quit, right there at the end of the panel meeting. He walked out of the room, out of the History hallway, straight off of campus. He never even went back to his office. He just disappeared. And three years passed.”

“Why are we slowing?” Rogan says abruptly. And then, “Shit.”

She points straight over Jalena’s shoulder. And right as she does, Jalena feels it, feels fingers pressing into the shoulders of her coat, only they’re too soft, straw fingers. The clown-faced wind whispers at her ear, and she whirls.

But she sees nothing. Just grass, endless, green-black in the moonlight, and rolling. The truck glides to a stop on the shoulder of the road, but Bemis doesn’t turn off the motor.

Several seconds pass before Jalena can shake off the feel of those fingers, the whispered words she hadn’t quite caught at her ear. She starts to shake her head, try a laugh, just to see if that feels right, and stops when she sees the lights.

A cluster of them, flashing all together maybe a foot above the grass, way off to her left. Another cluster flashes to her right, and winks out. Then more, even closer to the ground this time, almost in the grass, and also closer to the truck. They are all over the plain, she realizes. All around them. Flaring, blinking out.

“Ant firecrackers?” she finally says.

“Fireflies?” mutters Parrott.

“At the end of October?” snaps Rogan. “This long after dusk?”

“Too many,” says Frazee, which is silly, ridiculous, but also feels right.

There are too many. The lights shooting everywhere Jalena looks, in no discernible pattern, as though the whole prairie is sparking. The sparks too sudden and violent for firefly light, as though the wind itself is striking flint in the air.

And there’s a sound, too. At first, Jalena takes it for lightning sizzle, or downed power line, but there aren’t power lines she can see, and anyway, the sound is too soft, too gentle, could almost be grass waving, except this grass isn’t long enough to wave.

Frazee bangs her flat palm against the cabin’s back window. “You seeing this?”

“No,” Green barks. “We stopped to toke up.”

“You’re an ass, Green.”

But Green isn’t listening. He’s staring into the prairie and clutching Bemis’s wrist.

“There,” he says. “Bemis, you had to have—”

“Nope,” Bemis says, and shakes his arm free. “I see fireflies.”

“Fireflies my fat ass,” Green snarls.

“Well, you got that right, anyway,” mutters Rogan, and again, Jalena considers laughing, and then realizes that Green isn’t talking about the lights.

He has seen something else, or thinks he has. “She was right there.” He points straight out from the truck into the prairie.

She?

This time, Frazee only taps the window with her fingers. “Bill. How much farther, do you think?”

Bemis shrugs and lights a fresh cigarette. It’s the alcohol, Jalena knows — the years and years of it — that makes his hands tremble that way. Only the alcohol. But he keeps watching Green watch the grass. “Not very, I think. It’s been a while.”

“Maybe this is far enough.”

He glances over his shoulder, right into his ex-wife’s face. Another look that Jalena doesn’t recognize or understand passes between them. When Bemis next speaks, his voice has regained its customary bitterness. “Jalena’s tenured, after all. One of us. Part of this story, whether she wants to be or not.”

“Maybe it’s time we had a new story.”

“There are no new stories. Not for me. Just the inescapable rhythm.”

“Oh, Christ, just for once, Bill, talk Bemis. Not Stevens.”

“Fine. Here’s some Bemis: fuck off, Alexa. This is the only story I know how to tell. Thanks to you. How’s that?” He turns away and starts the truck.

Even sitting still, the air has gotten colder. As soon as the truck starts moving, Jalena can feel it shooting up her sleeves, down the throat of her closed coat. This isn’t the winter wind quite yet, she knows, but its herald. The lights in the grass have stopped sparking, or else the truck has passed the place where the lights are. Way out above the prairie, a single crow rides the gusts of breeze like a clump of black ash.

“Three years, he stayed gone,” Parrott says, when they’re moving at full speed again. “No letters. No e-mails. As far as I know, not a single one of us heard from him. His sister, either. And then, on Halloween, right at dusk, as we all gathered in Bemis’s office for the annual toast we’d taken to offering to him, David Roemer came back.”

“He just stuck his head in the door,” Rogan says, “like he’d only popped down to the Butterfly Café on Highbottom for a huckleberry chai.”

“ ‘Found it,’ ” Frazee says, in that recitation tone, again, as though she’s performing a poem, or praying. “That’s what he said.”

“ ‘Found them,’ ” Parrott corrects, even the correction part of the rhythm, as though that, too, got repeated every time they all told this.

And how often, Jalena wonders, have they told this? And to whom?

“He said, ‘them,’ ” Parrott continues. “And then he asked if we’d seen Marco.”

“Marco?” Jalena is listening, but also watching the prairie. Instead of sparking, it’s now sparkling, as though it has dewed over all at once in the last five minutes, the drops catching and scattering the starlight breaking out overhead. The whole prairie glints, the blades of grass silver and stiff and translucent as fingernails.

Fields and fields of fingernails, sticking up out of the ground.

“Marco Roemer. Maddy’s boy. David’s nephew. He was maybe eight, then? Apparently, David had showed up out of nowhere, picked up the kid from soccer practice, and brought him here. I mean, to the university. ‘Just stopped off to grab the rest of my files,’ he said. ‘Say goodbye, Marco.’

“And that was it. Off they went. Leaving us all. ”

“. just sitting there,” Frazee says, so sadly that Jalena takes her eyes off the prairie long enough to check on her. Frazee is crying silently, watching the grass. “Doing fuck-all, as always.”

“Paying him homage,” says Parrott.

“Instead of getting up and helping.”

“Actually,” says Rogan, “after he showed up, we didn’t know what to do except sit around and stare at each other, as usual. And wonder why we all seemed to feel so compelled to retell this story, about some fucked-up fucker even more fucked up than the rest of us.”

“Someone actually capable of living his life, you mean,” Parrott says. “Someone capable of real love.”

“Ah. Right. The digging-up-graves real love. The lit professor’s ideal. The made-up, fucked-up kind.”

This time, Frazee doesn’t take Rogan’s hand or even turn around. And that’s why Rogan is so angry, Jalena understands abruptly. She’s hurt, and she’s scared, because Frazee is so far away from her.

Then she thinks, I am actually seeing. I see.

“We were all still in our places,” says Parrott, “when Maddy Roemer burst through the door. ‘He’s got Marco,’ she said.”

“ ‘He’s going to kill Marco,’ ” murmurs Frazee.

Dazed by the lights on the prairie, the silver grass, the stars blooming in the blackness like thousands of parachutes opening all at once, an invading army gliding earthward, Jalena thinks she has misheard. “What?”

“ ‘He’s got my son,’ ” says Parrott, with a waver clearly meant to replicate Maddy Roemer’s. “ ‘He’s gone all the way batshit. He says he’s found them. The Carnival. He says they’re all dead.’ ”

Jalena stirs, alarmed. “What? Who? I don’t—”

“ ‘Murdered. All of them. Or something. They’re here, they’re back, and he thinks he’s gone to find Kate. And to do that — to find them — I think he’s going to kill Marco. Oh my God, he’s going to kill my son.’ ”

“To lure the Carnival — the murdered dead — to him,” Frazee explains. As though that explained anything. “Or get himself invited. Something like that.”

“ ‘He’s going to kill Marco,’ ” Parrott says again. In Maddy Roemer’s voice. “ ‘You’re his friends, aren’t you? Help me.’ ”

“We were all on our feet by that point,” says Frazee, flat toned. She still has tears in her eyes, and her hair whips out from under the scarves as the truck plunges forward and still more stars blossom all around them. She is speaking through her scarf, her coat collar, her chattering teeth. “Because the thing is, Jalena. we didn’t understand what she was saying, exactly. We still don’t, to be honest. But we knew she was right.”

“Right? Right? About what? That. that this Carnival was full of dead people?”

“That he was going to kill Marco. Kill his nephew. We all. you could just see it in him.”

“So there we all were,” Parrott says. “Galvanized at last. Ready to help. Because we all, well, we loved David.”

“Or we loved what happened to him,” says Frazee.

Across the truck, Rogan nods furiously, and for once, she’s the one who reaches out, grabs Frazee’s hand. “That’s the truth. That’s exactly right. We loved talking about David.”

“This part was almost funny,” says Parrott, though she doesn’t sound as though she thinks it was funny. “We realized that not a single one of us had any idea what to do next. Maddy didn’t know where he’d gone, understand, just that he’d taken the boy. All that scholarship in the room, and not a single one of us could figure out how to research a moment we were actually in.”

“How to engage life as it flies by,” Frazee says.

Parrott drones on. “I can’t remember whose idea it finally was—”

“Mine,” Rogan snaps. “It was mine.”

For the first time since the lights appeared in the grass, Frazee looks up and meets her partner’s glare. A smile — the ghost of one — flickers on her face, under the scarf. “It was yours.”

“Facebook,” Rogan says. “All the kids were doing it. So many that even we’d heard about it.”

“Once we were there, on the site, it didn’t take long,” Parrott says. “We. not Googled. There wasn’t Google, was there? What was the verb?”

“Who cares? How about ‘searched’?”

“Okay, yes, Dr. Rogan, fine. Just trying to be precise. We searched. We tried ‘carnival.’ We tried ‘dead people.’ And then we just typed in its name. ‘Mr. Dark’s Carnival.’ And there it was.”

“A single mention,” Frazee says. “On one user page.”

“Mr. Judgeandjury. Born 1881. Two friends, neither of whom any of us knew. One post, zero likes.”

“What was the post?”

“Numbers. Just numbers. N E 27 07 M 12. Or something very close to that.”

“None of us had any idea what those were, obviously. But Maddy Roemer was smart as hell. Even smarter than her brother, I think.”

“GPS coordinates?” Jalena says, and Rogan takes her eyes off Frazee long enough to look right at her, for once.

“Impressive,” she says.

It’s the surprise in Rogan’s voice that rankles Jalena, and also reminds her, again, that all this is for her: a performance, unless it really is a hazing, which it really might be. The words spill from her mouth before she can catch them.

“Africanist smart. Smart African, kemosabe.”

Instead of flaring up, spitting back, or blushing in embarrassment, Rogan levels her stare and holds Jalena’s eyes until Jalena’s slide sideways.

“I was simply marveling that you recognized the notation. None of us other kinda-smart people did. Of course, it was a while ago, now, and those devices weren’t so common.”

“We got down a road atlas,” Parrott says, “then doubled back to the Facebook page to make sure we’d gotten the numbers right. But the post was gone. There was nothing there at all.

“So we just took the numbers we had and went where they led.”

“That drive,” Frazee says suddenly, and not in storytelling rhythm but her everyday cadence. “My God, Darlene. Do you remember that drive?”

The truck, Jalena realizes, has started to slow. It isn’t stopping. But it’s crawling, now. And Green has his face pressed against the passenger-side window like a little boy pulling up to his grandparents’ house on a holiday, with his puffy, weirdly manicured hands poised on the door handle.

“I remember,” says Parrott, though she, too, has turned to stare into the night, over the prairie.

“All that orange light,” says Frazee.

“Was that that year?” Parrott grips the side of the truck, nodding. “It was. You’re right.”

“They—somebody—had slid orange plastic bags over every single streetlight in Clarkston. Also, it had just snowed, remember? The first snow, I think. And the way the wind made those bags flap, so that the light flickered? It was like we were all swimming in jack-o’-lantern light. Like the whole town was a jack-o’-lantern we were floating in.”

“All those people. ” Parrott says.

“You never saw that Clarkston, Jalena. It was already vanishing by the time you came. But my God. There we were following a frantic mother on a motorbike straight out of town, in the hopes of saving her son from her very possibly deranged brother, our former colleague and friend, and we all kept getting distracted by the light. And the houses. All those decked-out houses.”

“All done up in black crepe,” says Parrott.

“Lit skulls in upstairs windows, peeking out of drawn drapes,” Rogan adds.

“Whole flocks of ghosts tethered to the rooftops like. I don’t know. Like goats. Just floating around on whatever held them there.” Frazee is still looking at her gloved hands. She has actually turned her back on the grass, though she keeps glancing over her shoulder. “And then there were the kids, of course. Legions of them. People used to come from hundreds of miles away for Clarkston Halloween. From across the Continental Divide, even. From the Dakotas. They’d drive all the way here just to park somewhere on the outskirts of our town and spend as long as they possibly could wandering from haunted block to haunted block, or crawling through Stanton’s maze to get covered in spiderwebs and then rewarded with those brownies at the end.”

“Oh, my God,” says Rogan. “Stanton’s wife’s brownies. Those butterscotch chunks? Those hazelnuts?”

“Everybody, everywhere, just screaming and laughing.”

“Getting grabbed,” says Parrott.

“Getting laid,” says Rogan.

“Sounds Dionysian.” Jalena watches their faces. None of them are looking at each other. They are looking at their laps, or the grass. Yet again, Jalena feels that murmur of disquiet all over her body. “Sounds made up, to be honest. Like you’re pulling my leg.”

“Doesn’t it, though?” whispers Frazee.

And that’s when Green bursts from the truck, which doesn’t stop and veers suddenly as Bemis shouts, “What the fu—” and the door Green has flung open slams shut behind him. Frazee gets flung sideways into Jalena, and Parrott almost tips over the side before Bemis gets the truck straight, jams on the brakes, and brings them to a stop.

“Green!” Bemis shouts, flinging open his own door and racing around the front of the cab through the headlight beams to stand at the lip of the prairie. Parrott has straightened and stood up, and Frazee has got herself untangled from Jalena and hopped out of the truck bed to the gravel. She and Bemis stand together and watch Green lumber at startling speed, like a grizzly roused from hibernation, up a rise that didn’t even seem to be there a moment ago, down a little depression, the prairie nowhere near as flat as it appeared from the road, not flat at all. Green crests another slope, way out on the plain, already, and then he vanishes into the grass.

“Bill, what the hell?” Frazee asks.

Bemis pulls hard at his beard with a shaking hand. “Fuck if I know. He kept asking, ‘You see that?’ I didn’t see shit. And then he just. ” He waves his other hand at the prairie.

“Hey,” Rogan says, having crawled across the bed and joined Jalena and Parrott. “This is it, right? Is it? The exact same place?”

The glance Bemis aims at her is saturated with years-old contempt and resentment, and somehow makes him look even more exhausted than he usually does. “How would we know that, exactly? It’s grass.”

“How did we know then?” Parrott is climbing over the side of the bed, so awkwardly that both Frazee and Jalena have to help her down. “I don’t remember, do you?”

“The coordinates,” Frazee says.

“Which we may or may not have had right.”

“And Maddy Roemer’s bike, where she dumped it on the shoulder.”

“I think we better. ” Bemis says. With a sigh, and a single glance at his ex-wife and her lover — and without even looking at Jalena — he reaches back into the cab, under Green’s seat, and pulls out a rifle.

“What’s that for?” Frazee asks.

But Bemis just steps off the gravel to go find Green.

For a while, they stand and watch as he picks his way. Rises, descends. The same rises and descents as Green? Jalena isn’t sure. Bemis isn’t either, apparently; he keeps stopping to look around. In a surprisingly short time, he is far out toward the horizon, and those sparks of light have started up again, are shooting up not exactly around him, but too close for Jalena’s comfort. Not that he seems to notice. Bemis stops again, appears to bob in place.

Like a surfer sucked out to sea, Jalena thinks. As though the prairie has an undertow.

Then Bemis, too, slips from sight.

“Hey,” says Parrott.

“I see it,” says Frazee, stepping into the grass.

Jalena’s next move is instinctive, immediate. She loves — and doesn’t at all trust — being out here, in all this nowhere, with these people, who might be the only people on the planet, currently, that she could claim to know. Only living people, she thinks, and squashes that thought as she drops her hands to the cold steel sides of the truck and eases over onto the dirt. The one thing she is certain of is that she is going where Frazee goes. She turns toward the grass.

Then she wonders if that is exactly what they’re all counting on: getting her out there, away from the road, and any semblance of safe haven. So they can finish whatever the hell they’ve planned for her. Make her one of them.

She’s at the very edge of the gravel — the grass lapping at her feet like a lake tide, hitting exactly the same spot on the toes of her boots with each new gust of wind — when Frazee drops to one knee. She’s already fifty yards or more away from them. The grass does not rise up, gets no deeper around her. But Jalena could swear it stills as Frazee reaches into it. Her scarves are blowing, but the grass has gone quiet, which makes Frazee look like a Sioux squaw in a Charlie Russell painting, pulling washing out of a river.

From the grass, Frazee pulls up something striped. Even from this distance, Jalena can see that it’s fabric, and also filthy.

In the truck bed, Rogan has stood, now, too. “What is that? Alexa, come back.”

Frazee turns the fabric in her hands. She’s saying something, but her voice is inaudible.

“It looks like part of a prison uniform,” Jalena calls.

But Frazee shakes her head, lays the fabric neatly back where she found it, and smoothes it on the ground. This time, somehow, Jalena hears her loud and clear. “More like pajama pants. Maybe.” Then her head jerks up. “Bill?” she shouts into the dark. Then she’s up, and she’s running.

“Alexa!” Rogan shouts.

“Wait,” Jalena calls, and gets one foot in the grass before Parrott grabs her around the wrist and yanks her back.

“Listen.” Even now, Parrott speaks in that blank, airy whir. But her fingers grip like handcuffs. “Hear it?”

And for just a second, as she starts to shake loose, Jalena thinks she does. It’s faint, far away, out there where nothing is or at least should be.

“Is that a calliope?” says Parrott.

But Jalena is thinking about South Carolina. County fairs, cotton candy in her hand, a beer in her father’s and his other hand on her shoulder. The sounds out here are those sounds — rides, organ melodies in crackling speakers — but even tinnier. Half-strangled. “Could be an ice cream truck,” she says.

Parrott lets go and lights out in the direction of the sound, which is roughly toward Frazee, but at an angle, and the slope she stumbles down is a different one. Jalena almost calls her back. She feels the ghost of her father’s hand lift. Not that it was ever actually holding or steering or protecting her, anyway, even when it was really there.

“All right, that’s enough,” she says, and steps off the road.

“Don’t,” Rogan barks behind her, and then yells, “Alexa!” again.

“Shut up,” Jalena says. Rogan is either too frightened or playing too frightened to leave the truck, even for her lover.

She takes exactly two steps before the prairie grabs her. Just like that, she’s falling, her hands flying up not just to break the fall but to grab the ground, which is going to open, Jalena screams inside herself, is going to swallow me down, but it doesn’t. It smashes into her palms and mouth and punches her breath from her instead.

And in that single, silent moment — her lungs motionless inside her ringing bones, like empty stalls in an abandoned barn — Jalena hears the grass-waving sound again, and realizes that it isn’t grass at all; it’s whispering. A thousand, million whispering voices, just under her bruised hands, under the tissue-thin veil of earth, calling out to each other. Calling her down.

Just the ground, she snaps, inside her own head, where nothing and no one whispers. She makes herself breathe.

“Jesus, Jalena,” Rogan is calling, one leg over the truck side, though even now she seems reluctant to climb down. To touch this ground. “Are you all right?”

Jalena is still caught in whatever tripped her. Sitting up, she reaches back, edges her foot free, and stares at the single tent stake tilting out of the dirt. A big one, at least a foot and a half long. Strips of ragged orange and red cloth stream from it, as though whatever was here got ripped from its moorings and tumbled away down the grass.

“There really was a carnival,” Jalena says. For a moment, she’s relieved. Because her colleagues — friends? Maybe? — have not been lying or having her on. Then the moon seems to switch on, right overhead, giving her a better look at the stake in the ground, which has been driven not just into the earth but through the skull of a little shrew, or mole. Its skin still on it. A single, half-eaten eye leers up at her.

Scuttling backward, feeling wet dirt soak through the butt of her khakis, Jalena stares at that eye, can’t seem to break gazes with it, and even after she does, she can see it in front of her face. She blinks furiously, jams her fingers into her closed lids, and pushes, as though she could shove that poor thing’s face out the back of her brain.

When she opens her own eyes again, Rogan isn’t looking at her anymore. She’s looking at the plains. And her mouth has come open. Whirling, Jalena looks, too, and sees nothing. Just the grass rolling with the landscape, utterly still atop it.

She sees nothing.

Sees nothing.

“Wait,” she says. “Where is everybody?”

Way out on the plain, Frazee screams.

Instantly, Rogan is off the truck bed, sprinting into the grass, and Jalena is up and running, too, but not following. Rogan’s trajectory is wrong, she thinks, she’s veering way too far right. The explosion of gunshot makes Jalena jerk her head up, but she doesn’t even slow, just adjusts direction, heading toward Frazee’s voice. Toward her friend, Frazee, who has always been kind. The grass stays quiet under her feet, but the air has come to life, flapping in her face as though she’s plunging through a bat swarm, and there’s chittering, too, squeaking and cawing. At least one of the noises she’s hearing is her own voice, though the sound she’s making has neither language nor sense in it, is just herself streaming out. Her hands fly around her face as though warding off a gnat swarm, though there are no gnats, have been none. There’s whispering again, now, too. And that ice-cream-truck tinkling. Under her feet, the earth undulates, seems to bow beneath her weight, fling her upward, as though she’s running on a trampoline, on empty air, and she is constantly in danger of falling. If she falls, she knows — she knows—she will keep falling. Into nothing. Into waiting arms. Whispering, one-eyed faces.

She’s climbing a rise, now, and she hears the shouting to her left, all right, knows it’s aimed at her, but she doesn’t stop, keeps going, crests the hill, and just as she does, at the very instant the ground flattens beneath her, Rogan hurtles into her, slamming her sideways off her feet and down, hard, on a humped-up, rock-hard mound of earth. Her back cracks on top of it, almost snaps in half as Jalena throws her hands sideways again, grabbing the grass as she gulps for breath, stares at the billions of stars wheeling overhead, so close to the ground that she swears she can feel their heat in her hair, their feather-white touches on her skin and in her teeth. They are going to pour inside me, she thinks.

They are pouring inside me.

“Oh, God,” Rogan moans, straightens to her knees, and stares at Jalena. At the mound where Jalena lies. “This really is. we’re really here. In the exact. how does that. ”

It’s not true, Jalena knows—cannot be true — that the ground moves beneath her. Kicks, as though it has a fetus inside it.

But she shoves up anyway, jerking even her hands away from the dirt. She looks down between her splayed legs at the earth. “Really where?” she whispers.

Instead of answering, Rogan points ahead. Jalena follows her finger and sees the drop-off, almost completely invisible in the dark, a deeper shadow in a thousand-mile field of shadow. A bona fide cliff. The phrase swims up in her memory, out of some undergrad Western history seminar. Not a phrase she’s ever encountered since she’s actually lived in Montana.

Buffalo jump. Cliffs in the grass, over which the Plains Indians chased whole herds of bison, back when there were herds of bison. When that was almost all there was.

Before there was nothing.

“Rogan. Where are we?” Then Jalena feels it again: that squirming beneath her, the bumping along her legs. And she realizes that she knows what Rogan’s going to say, what they’ve been trying to tell her, all night. Now that she’s one of them.

“We’re where we buried him,” says Rogan. Right at the moment that — just over the lip of the buffalo jump — Frazee starts shrieking.

Immediately, Rogan is back on her feet, racing for the edge of the jump as though she’s going to throw herself off it. Jalena scrambles up, too, knowing the earth is not actually grabbing her. But the second she’s standing, the wind unleashes, crashing through her like a tidal wave, and it has things in it, flapping and gigantic and shapeless as that leaning, empty cowl on the airport terminal roof. There are sounds everywhere, too, in her hair, her ears, inside her skin. Bird wings beating. Locusts buzzing.

Grinding her teeth, flinging her hands across her face, Jalena stumbles off the mound — off David Roemer’s grave — toward the lip of the jump. She reaches it just as the wind passes all the way over, carrying off everything else with it, leaving her so surprised and her movements so unresisted that she almost tumbles into space.

But she doesn’t. She stops, staring down in stunned astonishment as the world opens beneath her, the real prairie, vast and flat and endless and utterly empty. Except for Frazee on her knees at the rocky base of the cliff, tearing at the grass as though she could rip out its heart, screaming, “God damn you. GOD DAMN YOU.”

And there’s Rogan, edging down the switchback path Frazee must have taken to get to where she is. She’s shouting, too. “Alexa, I’m coming!”

And there’s Bemis, who seems to pop up on the flat plain, somehow behind Frazee, and gazes wildly around himself, as though he’s surprised. As if the wind has lifted him up and dropped him there. The rifle in his hands seems to jerk as he lifts it. As though it is what’s lifting, not his arms.

No. As though the air itself is tugging his arms. As though he’s a marionette.

And just as it happens — right as the wind rises again, Jalena can see it this time, a huge, black, screaming thing, boring down on Bemis like a steam train — she begins to understand. Realizes what her brilliant colleagues have somehow missed, all these years. Whatever is out here — whatever spirited off David Roemer’s lover, or some flickering essence of her, and lured him after it, again and again, until it was finished playing with him, whatever has drawn them all out here tonight — it isn’t kind. Mr. Dark and his Carnival, whatever they are: they are not kind. They are not offering opportunities to commune with loved ones, or invitations to join them, or comfort in grief. They are playing. Toying. Casting the living in roles they cannot help but enact. Assigning them parts in a pantomime all its own.

She watches the wind smack into Bemis, all but lift him off his feet as it yanks his arms up, levels the rifle. Frazee shrieks, “David,” one last time before the gun goes off and the bullet blasts through her brain.

Then the wind engulfs Jalena, too, driving her to the earth, which is giving way as she knew it would, opening as she teeters, falls, the ground shockingly soft on her bruised back, the sky whirling and full of faces. So many faces.

“Dad?” she hears herself say. Then her vision clears, and the stars are on her.

She awakens in the bed of the truck, laid out flat with her head in Parrott’s lap. When she opens her eyes, the stars are still wheeling. She tries to lunge upright but her spine seizes, and she cries out.

“Sssh,” Parrott says, stroking her hair. “Sssh.”

The stars slow, like a switched-off ceiling fan. Slow. Go still. Stay put. Then they start to fade.

Which means it’s morning?

“How long?” she finally manages.

Parrott never looks down, answers automatically, as though she’s one of those fairground fortune-teller automatons. Climb on the scale, tell me your birthday, I’ll show you your future.

“A while,” she says. “You better have that head checked when we get back. Although I don’t think anything actually hit you.”

Red and blue lights skitter over the back of the truck cab, and again Jalena tries to rise. Again, she fails, but realizes what those lights are. She sucks in a long, deep breath, and a new feeling fills her. It should be panic. But it hurts too much.

“Frazee?” she whispers, although she already remembers.

Parrott just goes on stroking.

“Bemis?”

With a nod, Parrott directs Jalena’s gaze to the right. The bed of the truck is open. Bemis sits in the back of the nearest of three police cars, his head down, his handcuffed hands in his hair.

“Rogan?”

“She went with Alexa, of course. With Alexa’s body. They’ve already taken that.”

“Green?”

Parrott goes silent again, and Jalena thinks of his bottom desk drawer, full of photographs he has never let anyone see. Of a life, she is now certain, he had long since lost.

“Green’s gone, too?”

The sky continues to lighten. The stars slip back into their caves, one by one. Jalena imagines them up there behind the blue; she will sense them up there every second of the rest of her life. Hanging upside down, ringing the earth in their unfathomable trillions. A Hughes poem pops into her head, a rare one she’d studied for her dissertation, written during the Spanish Civil War and forgotten, about creeping dream shadows, a mother rocking her baby to sleep amid tanks and sirens. About wind grabbing and tossing men like straw.

“It’ll all come out now,” Parrott says eventually. “It probably should.”

But time passes, and policemen come and go, and no one asks them anything. The police car with Bemis in it returns to town. No one seems to have any idea where Green has gone; he’s just gone. Not until the sun has risen clear of the grass and fixed itself on the horizon does Parrott tell Jalena the rest, while they just sit together, alone again, with the sparkling in every direction, all around them. Winking with light.

“It happened so fast,” Parrott says, still stroking Jalena’s hair as though petting a cat or comforting a child. “It took nine years playing out, but the end came so incredibly fast.

“We got out here, where those coordinates had sent us. We poured out of this very truck in this very place and looked all around and saw lots of grass and nothing else. Then we heard the kid screaming, and we just raced onto the grass. All of us. Team Lit and Comp, Halloween Lifeguards, to the rescue. Ridiculous, really. Who did any of us think we were kidding?”

A shiver seems to spread across the prairie, from one end of the horizon to the other. Like a laugh, Jalena thinks, and shudders.

“Frazee saw him first. She called out, and I looked, and I saw what she saw. There was the kid, Marco, stretched out on some rock. And there was David Roemer over him, with. I don’t even know what it was. In my memory, it was a knife, but it might have been another rock. They were just frozen that way. It really was biblical. Some crazy Abraham and Isaac thing.

“But this is what’s important, Jalena. This is what you need to understand. It’s what we’ve always comforted ourselves with. And I still think it’s true. I really do.

“We were, I don’t know, fifty yards away? Maybe more? So David had plenty of time. He could have done whatever he wanted with that kid. And he just held there. I think he’d been poised like that for a long while. Do you see? He was never going to kill that kid. Not ever. The whole charade was for us. He just wanted to create that image. That moment.”

“So that one of you would kill him,” Jalena finishes. Because she does understand. He was going with his lover, or so he believed, which meant he’d be joining the Dark Carnival of the murdered dead. Which meant he had to be one of them.

“The rest of us — well, the men — just froze when they saw him. Rogan, she was new, she didn’t really understand what was happening. And I was doing something really helpful like waving my arms and shouting a lot. So that left Alexa. And Alexa. she was always the bravest. She just barreled toward him. Straight into him. She drove him right over that cliff. For a second, we thought they’d both gone over, but she’d just fallen in the grass. David landed on his head. We could all hear it splat even from where we were standing.

“And there it is. Now you know.”

Pushing gently but firmly in the small of Jalena’s back, Parrott eases her, finally, to a sitting position. With careful fingers, Jalena probes at the bruised spots on her spine, pressing until tears pour into her eyes.

“One of you,” Jalena whispers, in Frazee’s chanting cadence.

Parrott gazes at her. Her expression could almost be a smile. A lost and rueful one. “One of us. Think we can get you in the truck?”

They manage that, eventually. For one long moment, after she gets the engine started, Parrott sits, watching the prairie. Jalena, though, can’t bring herself to look at the grass. She watches Parrott, instead. And Parrott looks. not peaceful, exactly. But also not scared.

And that’s when Jalena knows she has it wrong. That all of them do. They always have. Because whatever it was that was holding that boy on that rock, that lured David Roemer out there and then stayed his hand, it wasn’t David Roemer. Any more than Frazee’s murderer was Bill Bemis.

It was that wind. The Dark Carnival. Mr. Dark’s Carnival. And when it comes — and apparently, sooner or later, it always comes — it takes not just everything you have, or had; it takes what you were.

How does she know? Because she was there, this time. She saw. She just knows.

“Can we go home?” she asks, hating how small her voice sounds.

“Which home?” Parrott asks.

But then, instead of explaining that, she releases the brake, keys the ignition, and turns the truck off the gravel, back toward Clarkston and civilization, where people cling to their days amid the memories of their dead, and shut their houses tight against the prairie wind, and play their parts, simply by doing their best to go on living.