“You still miss her, don’t you?” Darren asked. Darren definitely wasn’t the best-looking guy you’d ever meet. Technically, he was actually two guys. Darren and Damien, twins. The only problem was that they were two heads sharing the same body. Makes for an interesting conversation, to say the least. It’s also the reason that they’re here, at this carnival. 

            I nodded. I couldn’t even look at the cage that stood before me. The beautiful angel Trina once was, was no longer, replaced by a huge red cat, with baring fangs and a constant hunger for flesh. It wasn’t even the beast itself that turned my gaze away. It’s the eyes. They were not the eyes of the one I had once loved. They were the eyes of an insane, blood-thirsty beast.

            “Will, it was ten years ago, when will you finally stop moping around and do something useful,” Damien said, slightly annoyed.

            “Give him a break,” Darren said. “You should know how hard it is for him to even look at Trina.” He reached out their left arm, which they had agreed he had control over, and patted me on the shoulder. “And besides, he needs to save his strength for later. We open the show tonight.”

            Damien sighed. “Fine, whatever.” He bent them over and picked up a slab of raw meat, tossing it into the cave carelessly. “Don’t we have some dishes to wash or something?” Darren nodded and they walked away, leaving me alone with Trina.

            I stared into her cage for a minute, solemnly watching as she gobbled up the meat. 

            It had been ten years since we had come. Back then, Trina and I were just two 15-year-old kids at a carnival, having the time of our lives. But then he had come – Drake. A foul, evil man, who detested any kind of love. He immediately noticed the admiration we had for each other, and he cast a spell. I know, kinda Snow White fairy tail-ish. He cursed us so that we would never be together again. He disappeared soon after, probably too worried that he’d get in some kind of trouble. Trina was turned into the outlandish creature she was today. I had faired slightly better than her. I at least kept my sanity. I was turned into a vampire, a creature of the night, my blood-lust far stronger than any normal person’s. The only good thing that had come out of it was my increased strength. I was capable of breaking the average human bone.

             And so, Trina and I were adopted into the freak show of the Dark Carnival of the Immaculate, a carnival that did the best during Halloween season. It was a carnival made for the soul purpose of scaring the pants off of people so that they could have fun. It was the only way that we could survive.

            We fit right in with the rest of the freaks at the Carnival. We were, after all, freaks, just like them. We were shown off to people, who had different reactions to our many different talents. The main response was amazement, where people would stand there and stare at us in awe of our strangeness. But many of the performers’ gifts were a bit more than unusual, and were treated with disgust or boredom. People would sometimes make fun of us, or try to pass us as frauds. 

            The only thing was that no one in the show was a fraud. Everything that we showed off was one hundred percent real.

            I left Trina’s cage and wandered along the camp, passing clowns with strange faces, holding various items, from chain saws to axes to slingshots. That seemed to be the main theme around here lately – clowns. The owner, Mr. D, was really into clowns after he had watched a circus in New York a couple of months ago.

            I found my way to the tent I shared with Jarred, the ventriloquist. I didn’t really like sharing a tent with him. His collection of dummies kinda creeped me out. They made me think of an old Goosebumps episode I had seen when I was a kid, about a dummy that came alive and attacked a family. Without the dummies, Jarred wasn’t too bad. He was actually kinda funny. His only problem was that he enjoyed pulling pranks, since he knew about my slight fear of his dummies. They would pop up out of nowhere and scare me half to death. He was supposedly the best ventriloquist that ever existed. I had never seen another, so I couldn’t attest to that fact. But he was definitely good. His lips didn’t seem to move at all, and I had seen his dummies move without him even appearing to touch them. Of course, there was a secret behind that. He used a series of wires that were attached to the puppets and his fingers.

            I pushed back the flap of the tent and stepped inside. I was immediately welcomed by the site of a dummy sitting in the middle of my sleeping bag. The rest of the tent was dark. When I walked into the tent, the head of the dummy lifted to look towards me. “Hello William,” it “said” in a creepy voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up.

            “Jarred, I’m not in the mood for this today,” I said.

            Jarred popped up from behind our dresser. “Oh yeah, I forgot. It’s been ten years, hasn’t it?” He walked around the dresser and picked up the dummy. He placed it in its box with the others. He had been part of the show when I joined. He was two years older than me. He didn’t wait for me to answer. “No formal dinner tonight. We open in two hours.”

            “I know,” I said, lying down on my sleeping bag. I closed my eyes. “Wake me up at dinner.” I immediately drifted off into sleep.

 

            Jarred woke me up an hour later. We left the tent and walked to the mess tent, where everyone was already forming a line, ready to grab a quick meal before changing into costumes and preparing last minute decorations. We met up with Bella, my partner in performing on stage. “Mr. D says we have a special guest tonight,” she said. “He won’t tell anyone who it is, just that we should be prepared for the worst. He says it’s someone that might make you unhappy.”

            “Who could it be?” Jarred asked. 

            Bella shrugged. “All I know is that he’s someone important.”

            Who would I be unhappy to see? It wasn’t like I knew a lot of people. I hardly knew anyone who worked at the Carnival, let alone anyone outside of it. We rarely got news of the outside world, since we were busy traveling, performing, setting up for performing, and packing up for traveling. There was no free time to be spent doing things we enjoyed.

            We advanced quickly through the line and were soon eating our food at one of the many collapsible tables. Some nights, when we weren’t performing, everyone would eat together at the same time, and the tent would be packed. On performing nights, especially debut nights in a town, everyone was in too much of a rush, so it was basically just run in, grab food, eat it, and leave. The food was also worse on these nights. The cooks weren’t just cooks, so they didn’t have time to make anything special. Tonight was just beans and franks, a cowboy meal. It was kind of ironic, since we were in the desert of Arizona. Thankfully, it was winter, so it didn’t feel like we were living in an oven set to self-clean.             

            We finished our meal hastily and hurried out of the tent, back to our own tents. We freak show performers had costumes to get into and lines to go over. Then it was off to the performance tent where we would be shown off.

            Jarred and I changed, him into a suit and bow tie, me into a nice pair of jeans and a suit top. I chose not to wear a costume. I never really found them to be comfortable.

            When Jarred was done picking his doll for the night, we left the ten together. We checked in at the front of our tent and made our way to the back. Basically, we would sit behind the tent and wait until it was our turn to go on. When it was, we’d enter through a flap in the back and walk onto the stage. It wasn’t really a stage, just a platform that could be folded up and rolled into a truck. But it definitely served its purpose.

            Each performer went on two times a night. The first act was Darren and Damien. They did a comedy skit where they tried to beat each other up. After them was Melinda, who could read minds. She would bring up a volunteer, who would be mystified as she read every thought that passed through their mind. Then came Jarred. His dummy of the night, Jonnie, jumped off the stage and sat on the shoulder of a person in the audience. It cackled and said, “Oh, so this is what it’s like to be a giant. I’ve always wondered. The air up here’s nice, isn’t it?” Next was George, the fire-eater, and Freddy, AKA fish-boy. Freddy was the youngest of all the performers, at the tender age of twelve. His talent was his ability to stay underwater for several minutes. A tank of water would be brought out for him, and he would climb in and smile and wave to the audience for a few minutes.             As soon as the tank was pulled off the stage, it was time for me and Bella. We smiled nervously at each other and walked onstage, bowing before beginning our performance. Basically, I would bend her elbow the wrong way until it broke. I repeated this with the other arm and then did it to both of her knees. I tried not to watch as the pain registered on her face. The audience listened closely for the cracking noise that signaled the breaking of her bones. Bella then tried to get up and failed. I helped her into a chair and stepped back as she did her stuff. She chewed her lip to try to ignore the pain as she stretched her leg out to unimaginable lengths. By the time she was done, it had to have been several feet longer. She snapped it back in place and repeated with the other leg and both arms. By the time she was done, she could stand with no problem. She flexed her elbows and knees to show that they were okay. There was applause while we took another bow and walked offstage. 

            The next performer was Jade. She sat down in a chair and relaxed. To the audience, it seemed that she was doing nothing, but to me it was different. My eyes had become accustomed to her speed. I could see the instant where she got up and grabbed the hat off of a guy in the middle of the crowd. “Is this your hat?” she asked him. He nodded, amazed, and accepted it as she gave it back. The first time I had seen Jade do this, it looked as if the hat had appeared out of thin air in her hand. This was not true. The truth was that she did it so fast that no one in the audience was able to see her even move. She finished off her act by vanishing in the middle of bowing. The audience always clapped the loudest for her. 

            Last but not least was Trina. They carted her cage, which was covered by a cloth, into the middle of the stage. Then they pulled the cloth off and watched as fear spread through the audience members. They had no clue what they were looking at. All they knew was that it was frightening. Trina didn’t even do any tricks. Her appearance was enough to shock anyone. The only thing she did was howl. A long, melancholy howl.

            When she was done, they brought her off stage and the spectators filed out of the tent, everyone talking about the most and least disappointing. The freaks stayed behind the tent, getting ready for their next performance.

 

            I was relived when our final performance of the night was over. I watched Jarred untie the wires from his fingers and wrap them around his doll. The rest of the Carnival was starting to empty out. It was getting late, and people wanted to go home and go to sleep. We helped out with cleaning the popcorn and garbage off of the ground for a while, then headed to the mess tent for a piece of celebratory cake. It was customary for everyone who worked here to stay up late and sleep in late. It’s just the way things worked. 

            Me, Jarred, Bella, and Jade shared a table, discussing the good points and bad points of the night. I studied my friends as they talked. 

            Jarred had dark, curly hair and a face that couldn’t stop smiling. Even his dark eyes smiled as he laughed at some joke that he had made.

            Bella was the essence of timidness. She was pale, with medium-length blonde hair. She was petite, shy, and insecure. She smiled meekly at Jarred’s joke. Then, she went right on back to biting her nails. She chewed those things down until there was nothing white left there. I though back to the day she joined us. She had been eighteen, running away from her parents. She heard about the carnival and set her sights on joining it. Before she came, I was the assistant of a guy who could make a flower grow, bloom, and die in under a minute. He left right before she came, and I had been left without a job until she came. In the four years that I had known her, she had never opened up. Jade and I were the only people she felt comfortable around.  

            Jade was the opposite of Bella. Every feature about her was bold and daring, her frame tall and wiry. She had olive-oil skin and high cheekbones. Her hair was light brown and short. Her deep hazel eyes stared at Jarred and she laughed vivaciously at his joke. Jade was the newest out of all of us. She had come out of nowhere two years ago, storming into the group of tents, demanding that Mr. D give her a job. As soon as he saw what she could do, he knew right away that he had a good money-maker. She was the kind of person who could easily attract attention, not just because of her skill, but also because of her personality.

            Mr. D walked up to the table. “Have fun tonight?” 

            The four of us nodded like perfect little kindergarteners. “That’s good to hear. Could you guys come to my tent? I want you to meet that special guest I told you guys about.”

            We nodded obediently again. There was no such thing as disobeying Mr. D. His decisions were final, no ifs, ands, or buts. It was always best to stay on his better side. He could have a mean temper, as we had experienced a few years ago. He had exploded on poor Greg, and none of us ever saw Greg again. I had liked Greg too. I was sad to see him go. And then there was the mystery of Mr. D’s name. I don’t think anyone that worked here knew his actual name. It was just Mr. D to everyone.

            We finished our cake and made our way to his tent. As we walked up to it, we could hear voices. They were too low to hear what was being said, but I could definitely make out the cold voice that I remembered from so long ago. I froze, terrified. Drake was back.

            “What’s wrong?” Bella whispered worriedly.

            “He’s probably just scared to see old D,” Jade retorted quietly. “His ugly mug is enough to scare anyone.” Jarred burst out laughing, but soon shut up as the flap of the tent opened.

            “What’s so funny, Jarred?” Mr. D’s said, giving us a scrutinizing look. 

            “Nothing,” Jarred said softly.

            “Well, come in then. It’s about time you meet our special guest.” He held the flap open and we slipped into the tent.

            The person stood in the back of the tent, his back turned to us. As we took seats in folded chairs scattered throughout the tent, he turned around.

            All of my worst fears were confirmed. It was Drake! My heart started to beat itself out of my chest.

            Mr. D walked across the tent to stand next to Drake. He pointed to each of us one by one. “These are four of our youngest performers – Jarred, Jade, Bella, and William.” Drake gave each of us a nod and a smile. “I’d like you all to meet my brother, Draco. He’s going to be staying with us for a while and performing with you guys.”

            Drake, or I guess I should call him Draco, walked up to me and held out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, William,” he said, winking. “I’m sure we’ll have a great time together.”