Horrorscopes: Twelve Tales of the Macabre

Four Knaves

 Calliope music blended with a gradient of upraised voices ranging in every variety between children’s laughter and the adults’ screams of exhilaration. The sour aroma of sweat pervaded the sweeter scents of cotton candy and cedar game stalls. Horses stamped their hooves in beds of pine needles, carnies and barkers bellowed out exaggerated claims, ever seeming to compete with one another. Everywhere, there were bodies; clad in all manner of colors, though all material was light and airy to combat the heat of late August. The distant odor of diesel emissions on Interstate 88 added to the already sweltering boil of mid-afternoon and Claire Forbes grimaced in her own sweat-laden and clinging clothes.

She suddenly longed for the freshness of her bath at home.

Claire wandered among the grounds of the bustling flea market, her eyes and ears open, but not seeking anything in particular. It was JuniperFest, the long-awaited and well-received carnival experience of Juniper Hills, and it came but once a year.

She watched the faces floating through the wavering mirages of rising heat; faces of children leaning over game countertops, throwing darts at pinned balloons or balls at stacked pewter cups. Faces of the elderly, pale and veiled against the treacherous sun, but otherwise unscathed by the uncomfortable conditions of the day. Young lovers held hands and beamed at one another and older married couples displayed an affection that Claire suspected didn’t rear its head so often, anymore.

And she suddenly felt very alone.

She raised up on tip-toes, trying to find the bobbing face of her sister in the crowd. But Lee and her husband had taken the kids on the Tilt-A-Whirl; leaving Claire to herself, clutching the family’s empty picnic bag and rucksack containing extra clothes- in case one of the boys upchucked on himself. Besides, Lee was not the person she truly missed.

It was Tim, she knew—bastard--though she wanted nothing less than to see him here. Now. She looked again to the adoring couples paired together all around her. Bastards, she though again. All of them, cheating bastards. She and Tim had split two weeks before the eagerly-awaited coming of JuniperFest and if she saw him here with her, she thought she might die.

As thoughts of herself single and childless loomed in—and with the big three oh steadily advancing—she distracted herself by peering through the smudged glass of a funnel cake hut. With a thoughtful finger tapping her chin, she covered her narrow abdomen with her free arm, as if hugging the child which will never take seed there.

“Ugh,” she grunted with disgust. “Shut up already!”

“You say something, ma’am?” She looked up into the expectant face of the robust woman running the funnel cake hut. Ma’am, she had said. Not miss, but ma’am. God, was this how it started?

Claire shook her head and turned away from the alluring cakes. Besides, she had already packed herself tight with corn dogs and kettle corn. Presently, her eyes fell on the crimson and violet flaps of a carnival tent. Not a cedar stall of the game booths or the steel and canvas market cabanas, but a real carnival tent.

This had to be good.

She crept closer, drawn by the intrigue of an old-fashioned tent amid this modern carnival flea market, her eyes honing in on the tent to save her from peering among the faces in an effort to spot Tim's. It was a wide structure, sprawling out thirty feet on each side, standing more than fifteen feet at its highest point in the center. Beside the shadowy recesses of the entrance rested a sandwich board sign standing of its own accord. Claire stopped in her tracks.

FORTUNES DIVINED BY MADAM VOLTAIRE, it read.

“Gimme a break,” she said, disappointed.

“Come inside,” a voice beckoned from the darkness within.