The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER The Twilight Express

The funfair blew in one hot, windy night in early July, while everyone's doors and windows were sealed against the invading desert dust. Billy Fleet knew it was coming when he heard the distorted sound of a calliope drifting faintly on the breeze, but he didn't think then that it might hold the answer to his problem.

He leaned on his bedroom sill, watching the soft amber light move across the h6rizon of trees, beneath a velvet night filled with pinhole stars. The country dark was flushing with their arrival. On another night he might have climbed the trellis in his peejays and sat on the green grit of the tarpaper roof to watch the carnival procession, but tonight he had too much on his mind. The fair had travelled from Illinois to Arizona, and somehow made the detour here. There were a few dates yet that weren't played out, small towns with bored kids and fathers jingling chump change, but soon the carnies would be looking to put down roots before the dying summer cooled the hot sidewalks and families grew more concerned with laying in stores for winter than wasting good money on gimcrack sideshows and freak tents.

Billy turned restlessly under his sheets, wondering what it would take to clear his troubles, and the more he thought, the more desperate he became. His mother would cry, his father would beat him, and then a subtler meanness would settle over his life as friends and teachers pulled away, shamed by his inability to do what was right. It was a town that put great store by self-discipline.

But it wasn't cowardice that would prevent him from pleasing them, it was preservation. He wasn't about to throw his life away just because Susannah's period was late. No matter how hard she pushed, he wouldn't marry her. Hell, he wasn't sure he even liked her much, and would never have gone up to Scouts' Point if she hadn't complained that all the other girls had been taken there. The entire bluff was crowded with creaking cars, and though the scent of rampant sex excited him, it all felt so tawdry, so predictably small town. He had no intention of staying in Cooper Creek for a day longer than he had to, for each passing moment brought him closer to stopping forever, just as his father had done, and boy, the family had never heard the end of that.

He couldn't just up and leave without money, qualifications, some place to go, and with just three weeks left before his graduation, it was a matter of pride to stay. He imagined the door to a good out-of-state college swinging open, taking him to a bright new future. But by the time summer break was over Susannah's belly would be round as a basketball, and the trap would have closed about him. He knew how the girls in the coffee shop talked, as if finding the right boy and pinning him down was the only thing that mattered. Mr Sanders, his biology teacher, had told him that after babies were born, the male stopped developing because his role in the procreation cycle was over. It wasn't right that a girl who came from such a dirt-dumb family as Susannah should be able to offer him a little dip in the honey-pot and then chain him here through the best years of his life, in some edge-of-town clapboard house with a baby-room, where the smell of damp diapers would cling to his clothes and his loveless nights would be filled with dreams of what might have been.

There had to be another solution, but it didn't present itself until he went out to the field where the Elysium funfair was pitching up in the pale gold mist of the autumn morning, and watched as the roustabouts raised their rides, bolting together boards and pounding struts into the cool earth. There was a shop-soiled air about the Elysium, of too many tours without fresh paint, of waived safety permits and back-pocket accounting. The shills and barkers had not yet arrived, but Billy could tell that they, too, would be fighting for one more season before calling it a day and splitting up to go their separate ways. Funfairs rarely stopped at Cooper Creek; there wasn't enough fast money to be made here, and although the local folks were kind enough to passing strangers, they didn't care to mix together.

Billy sat on the back of the bench and watched as the gears and tracks were laid behind the flats. He saw missing teeth and caked oil, mended brake-bars and makeshift canopies, iron rods bound with wire over rope, and wondered how many accidents had forced the Elysium to skip town in the dead of night. That was the moment he realized he would be able to kill Susannah's baby.

He saw the question as simply one of survival. He had something to offer the world, and the only obstacle that waited in his path was a wide-eyed schoolgirl. As the yellowing leaves tumbled above his head, Billy felt the first chill decision of adulthood.

The funfair ran its cycle through Labor Day, but only passed by Cooper Creek for a week. He felt sure that convincing Susannah to come with him would be easy, but before that evening he needed to find a way inside the ghost train. He had watched the canvas flats of hellfire and damnation being put together to form a righteous journey, devil snakes and playing cards lining the tunnel through which the cars would roll. Now he needed to befriend the woman who was helping her old man set up the ticket booth, the one the roustabouts called Molly. He knew how to use seventeen years of healthy boyhood on a thirty-five-year-old overweight woman. Girls flirt with attractive men, but boys flirt with anyone.

When he approached her, she was bending over a broken step, and all he could see was the wide field of blue cornflowers that covered her dress. He stood politely until she rose, hands on hips, a vast acreage of sun-weathered cleavage smiling at him. Her small grey eyes no longer trusted anything they saw, but softened on his face.

"Help you, boy?"

"Ma'am, my name's Billy Fleet, and I'm raising money for my college education by trying to find summer work. I know how to fix electrics, and it seems to me you need someone to work the ghost train, 'cause you got some shorts sparking out in there, and I ain't seen no one go in to repair 'em."

"What are you, town watchdog? Got nothing better to do than spy on folks trying to earn a decent living?" Molly's bead-eyes shrank further.

"No Ma'am. I meant no disrespect, I just see you setting up from my bedroom window and know you're shy a man or two. This town's real particular about health and safety, and I figure I can save you a heap of trouble for a few bucks."

The woman folded fat arms across her considerable bosom and rocked back to study him. "I don't take kindly to blackmail, Billy boy." Her eyes were as old as Cleopatra's, and studied him without judgment. "Fairs don't take on college kids. It don't pay to be too smart around here."

"Maybe so, but in this town a fair is a place where a guy gets a rosette for keeping a pig. This is a real carnival. It's special."

"Ain't no big secret to it. You take a little, give a little back, that's all." She saw the need in his eyes and was silent for a moment. "Hell, if the town is so dog-dead you got to watch us set up from your bedroom at nights maybe we can work something out. Let me go talk to- Papa Jack."

That was how Billy got the job on the Twilight Express.

The night the fair opened, white lights punched holes into the blue air, and the smell of sage and dust was replaced with the tang of rolling hotdogs. Susannah had planned to go with her girlfriends, to shriek and flirt on the opalescent Tilt-A-Whirl, holding down their skirts and tossing back their hair with arms straightened to the bar, bucking and spinning across the night. She agreed with just a nod when Billy insisted on taking her, and he wondered whether she would really be fussed if he just took off, but he couldn't do that. He couldn't bear the thought of people bad-mouthing him, even though he wouldn't be there to hear it. So he took Susannah to the fair.

He couldn't bring himself to place his arm around her waist, because the baby might sense his presence and somehow make him change his mind. Babies did that; they turned tough men into dishrags, and he wasn't about to let that happen. She wore a red dress covered in yellow daisies like tiny bursts of sunlight, and laughed at everything. He couldn't see what was funny. She was happily robbing him of his life and didn't even notice, pointing to the fat lady and the stilt-walkers, feeding her glossy red mouth with pink floss as if she was eating sunset clouds.

He thought she would want to talk about the baby and what it meant to them, but she seemed happy to take the subject for granted, as if she couldn't care whether there was something growing inside her or not.

At the entrance of the ghost train, Molly watched impassively as he passed her without acknowledgment. Susannah balked and tried to turn aside when she reached the steps to the car. "No, Billy, don't make me go. It's dark in there. Let's take the rope-walk instead."

"Don't make a big deal of it, Susannah, the ghost train's a few devils and skeletons is all." He had stood inside the ride beside the flickering tissue-inferno, breathing in the coppery electric air, watching the cars bump over soldered tracks that should have been scrapped years ago, lines that could throw a rider like a bronco.

She saw the pressure in his eyes and gave in meekly, took her ticket and bowed her head as she passed through the turnstile, as if she was entering church. The car was tight for two adults; he was forced to place his arm around her shoulder. Her hair tickled his forearm. She smelled as fresh-cut as a harvest field. With a sudden lurch, the car sparked into life and a siren sounded as they banged through the doors into musty darkness.

He knew what was coming. After a few cheap scares of drifting knotted string and jiggling rubber spiders, the car would switch back on itself and tilt down a swirling red tunnel marked Damnation Alley, but just before it dropped into the fires of hell it would swing again, away to the safer sights of comically dancing wooden skeletons. The track was bad at the switch; a person could tip out on the line as easy as pie. The next car would be right behind, and those suckers were heavy. Papa Jack had fallen into a bourbon bottle a couple of nights back, and told him about a boy who had bust his neck when the cars had stalled in Riverton Fields, Wichita, a few seasons back. The Elysium had hightailed it out of town before their Sheriff could return from his fishing trip, had even changed its name for a couple of years. A second accident would get folks nodding and clucking about how they suspected trouble from the carnie folk all along. He would make sure Susannah didn't get bruised up, he wouldn't want that, but she had to take a spill, and land good and hard on her stomach.

As the car hit its first horseshoe she gripped his knee, and he sensed her looking up at him. He caught the glisten of her eyes in the flashbulbs, big blue pupils, daybreak innocent. They tilted into the spiralling tunnel and she squeaked in alarm, gripping tighter, as close now as when they had loved. The moment arrived as they reached the switch. The car lurched and juddered. All he had to do was push, but she was still holding tightly onto him. In an effort to break her grip, he stood up sharply.

"Billy — what —»

The car twisted and he tipped out, landing on his back in the revolving tunnel. Susannah's hands reached out toward him, her fingers splayed wide, then her car rounded a black-painted peak and was gone. The cylinder turned him over once, twice, dropping him down into the uplit paper fires of damnation, scuffing his elbows and knees on the greased tracks.

And then there was nothing beneath his limbs.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in the fierce green fields behind the house. Judging by the smell of fresh grass in the morning air, it was late spring, but he was wearing the same clothes. The sun was hot on his face, his bare arms. The voice spoke softly behind him. He could only just hear it over the sound of the crickets and the rustling grass.

"Oh Billy, what a beautiful day. If only it was always like this. I remember, I remember — " She was lying in the tall grass near the tree, running a curving green stem across her throat, her lips. Her print dress had hiked around her bare pale thighs. She stared into the cloudless sky as though seeing beyond into space.

"What have you done with the baby, Susannah?"

"I don't know," she replied slowly. "It must be around here somewhere. Look how clear the sky is. It feels like you could see forever."

The day was so alive that it shook with the beat of his heart, the air taut and trembling with sunlit energy. It was hard to concentrate on anything else. "We have to find the baby," he told her, fighting to develop the thought. "We went to all that trouble."

He looked up at the sun and allowed the dazzling yellow light to fill his vision. When he closed his eyes, tiny translucent creatures wriggled across the pink lids, as mindless and driven as spermatozoa.

"I forget what I did with it, Billy. You know how I forget things. Will you make me a daisy chain? Nobody ever made me a daisy chain. Nobody ever noticed me until you."

"Let's find the baby first, Susannah."

"I thi'nk perhaps it was out in the field. Yes, I'm sure I saw it there." She raised a lazy arm and pointed back, over her head. Her hair was spread around her head in a corn-coloured halo. She smiled sleepily and shut her eyes. The lids were sheened like dragonfly wings. "I can see the stars today, even with my eyes closed. We should never leave this place. Never, ever leave. Look how strong we are together. Why, we can do anything. You see that, don't you? You see that…" Her voice drifted off.

Her watched her fall asleep. She looked a little older now. Her cheekbones had appeared, shaping her face to a heart. She had lost some puppy fat. Light shimmered on her cheeks, wafted and turned by the tiny shields of leaves above. "I have to go and look, Susannah," he told her. "There are bugs everywhere."

"You just have to say the name," she murmured. "Just say the name." But her voice was lost beneath the buzzing of crickets, the shifting of grass, the tremulous morning heat.

He rose and walked deep into the field, until he came to a small clearing in the grass. Lowering himself onto his haunches, he studied the ant nest, watching the shiny black mass undulating around a raised ellipse in the brown earth. The carapaces of the insects were darkly iridescent, tiny night-prisms that bustled on thousands of pin-legs, batting each other with antennae like blind men's canes. He shaped his hands into spades and dug them into the squirming mass of segmented bodies, feeling them tickle over his hands and wrists, running up his arms. They nipped at his skin with their pincers, but were too small to hurt. Digging deeper until his fingertips met under the earth, he felt the fat thoraxes roll warmly over his skin. Carefully he raised the mound, shaking it free of insects. A baby's face appeared, fat and gurgly, unconcerned by the bugs that ran across his wide blue eyes, in and out of the pouted lips. Raising the child high toward the fiery summer globe, he watched as the last of the ants fell away, revealing his smiling, beautiful son.

"Tyler," he said, "Tyler Fleet."

And he set off back towards his sleeping wife.

"Billy. Billy, you came back." Her lank hair hung over his face, tickling. Her plucked eyebrows were arched in a circumflex of concern. She had been crying.

"What's your problem?" he asked slowly, feeling the words in his mouth. He was lying on the cool dry dirt in front of the ghost train ride. A few passers-by had stopped to watch.

"You fell out of the carriage is what's the problem," she said, touching his cheek with her fingers. "You cut your forehead. Oh, Billy."

"I'm fine. Was just a slip is all." He raised himself on one elbow. "No need to get so worked up." He rubbed the goosebumps from his arms.

"I was so frightened in there, I thought I'd lost you, I panicked," she told him. "Look." She held up her palm and showed him the crimson dot. "It's my blood, not yours. I started late, that's all. I'm not pregnant, Billy. I'm sorry."

He realized why she had been so unconcerned at the fair. She had been happy to place her trust in him unquestioningly. It had never crossed her mind that things might not work out. He studied her face as if seeing her for the first time. "I'm so sorry," she said again, searching his eyes in trepidation.

"Don't worry," he told her, pulling himself up and dusting down his jeans. "Maybe we can make another one." He offered his arm. "Give me your hand." He sealed his fingers gently over the crimson dot. She pulled him to his feet, surprisingly strong.

Molly looked up as he passed the ticket booth to the Twilight Express. There was no way of knowing what she was thinking, or if she was thinking anything at all. "Hey Billy, Papa Jack wants you to work with him tomorrow night," she told him. "You gonna need to put that money by. The baby'll be back, and maybe next time you'll be ready for him."

Then she went back to counting the change from the tickets.

The moon above the Elysium funfair shone with the colours of the sideshow, red and blue glass against butter yellow, as the calliope played on, turning wishes into starlight.

The Twilight Express was gone. It had been replaced by the Queen of The South, a Mississippi riverboat ride where passengers seated themselves on cream-coloured benches and watched as their paddle steamer slipped upriver, not past the real southland of jute factories and boatyards and low-cost housing, but an imagined antebellum fantasy of filigreed plantation houses glimpsed through Spanish moss. The candy-coloured deck looked out on pastel hardboard flats and painted linen skies that creaked past on a continuous roll as birds twittered on the tape loop.

Molly was still here at the Elysium, working the riverboat ride now. She watched him approach without pleasure or sorrow shaping her face. He supposed carnie folk saw too much to care one way or the other. To her, he was just another small-town hick.

"So you didn't leave," she said, sweeping coins from her counter without looking up.

"Did I say I was going?" he asked defensively.

"Didn't have to." She stacked dimes to the width of her hand, calculating the value, then swept them into a bag. "You should bring your wife here."

"You don't know I married her," he said, kicking at the dry dirt in annoyance.

"Don't I, though." Her expression never changed.

He left her counting the gate money, and resolved not to bring Susannah to the Elysium. But he did, that Friday night.

He breathed in the smell of hot caramel, sawdust and sugar-floss, fired a rifle at pocked metal soldiers and hooked a yellow duck for Tyler, but wouldn't go near Molly's ride. "I don't need to go on that," he told his wife, watching as she held their baby to her breast. "Not after last time."

Susannah jiggled the baby and stood looking up at the painted riverbank. "That was more than three years ago, Billy. The Twilight Express is gone. It's not a ghost train anymore. No one's gonna fall out of the car." She smiled at him bravely, as if it was all that could protect her from his simmering impatience.

Billy still wasn't sure what had happened that time. The accident had changed something between them. All he remembered was that she had freed him and he had elected to stay, but part of him remained regretful. He loved his boy, but the smell of the infant had lingered too long on his skin, reminding him of his responsibilities, removing any pretence of freedom. There was never time to be alone and think things through.

He worked in his uncle's feed store now, and made a decent living, but it wasn't what he had imagined for himself. Sometimes strangers passed through the local bar and talked of harsh cities they'd seen, strange lands they'd visited, and he wanted to beg them; let me come with you.

He loved his son, but knew there could have been a better life. The carnival had changed all that. It took a little and gave a little back, that's what Molly had once told him.

"Come with me," said Susannah. "We're a team. We do things together."

"You two are the team. Go have fun," he said, placing a hand firmly in the small of her back, propelling her toward the steps of the Queen of The South, its minstrel music piped through speakers set on either side of the great painted boat that seemed to move forward but never travelled anywhere. "Show Tyler the Mississippi. I'll be here when you get off."

Susannah passed reluctantly through the turnstile, balancing the boy on her hip. From within the ticket booth, Molly caught his eye for the briefest of moments, and he read something strange in her expression. His wife looked back, the dying daylight shining in her eyes. Her glance pierced his heart. She gave a brief nervous smile and stepped inside the boat. He wanted to run forward and snatch her back before she could take her seat, to tell her he knew what he had and it was real good, but even as he thought this he wondered what else he might be missing, and then the banjo music had started, the ply-board trees were shunting past, and the steamer was gradually lost from view.

The ride was long. He grew bored with waiting and tried to knock a coconut from its shy, even though he knew it was probably nailed in place. When he returned to the ride it had already emptied out, but there was no sign of his young family. He asked Molly where they had gone, but she denied ever having seen them. None of the barkers would be drawn on the subject. He vaulted into the back of the riverboat ride, clambering through the dusty sunlit diorama, trying to see how they might have escaped through the pasteboard flats, but was pulled out by Papa Jack.

Billy yelled and stamped and made a fuss, finally called the Sheriff, but everyone agreed that Susannah had gone, taking their child with her. People looked at him warily and backed away.

The heatwave broke on the day the Elysium carnival trundled out of town. As rain darkened the bald dirt-patch where the tents had stood, Billy watched the trucks drive off, and knew that he had failed the test.

The lilting sound of the calliope stole away his dreams and faded slowly with them, leaving him under clouded skies, filled with bitter remorse. Twilight died down to a starless night, and there was nothing left inside it now, just the empty, aching loss of what he might have had, who he might have been, and the terrible understanding that he had been looking too far away for the answer to his prayers.

Somewhere in another town, another state, the Twilight Express showed the way between stations for those passengers who were strong enough to stay on the ride.