6

“WHY DONT YOU TWO meet me back here in one hour?” Abra’s mom suggested. She was a plump woman with curly brown hair. She smiled a lot, but worry clung to her like a subtle perfume, and it took all of Abra’s cunning to get her mom to approve of anything that might be even slightly dangerous. I have no idea how Abra talked her mom into dropping us off at the fair on opening night, but somehow she had. I can only believe that my memories of those days are true, that they were simpler times when children were safe walking the streets alone, at least in Deen.

“Mom!” Abra complained. “That’s not any time at all!”

Mrs. Miller sighed and looked down at her watch. Cars coasted past us along Kincade Road, dropping people off at the sidewalk before turning off into one of the large grassy areas to park. The lights from the fair reflected off Mrs. Miller’s face, blinking and changing color.

“Okay, two hours, but that’s it.”

Abra squealed. “Thanks, Mom! Thank you thank you thank you thank you—”

“Fine, fine,” she said, smiling, but her face grew serious. “Listen to me right now, both of you. You are allowed in the food area and the front part of the ride area, but no going back into all of that . . .”

She couldn’t seem to come up with a word for the part of the fair that was the farthest from the road, the area down the hill beyond the rides. She waved her hand at us, knowing that we knew what she meant.

“That darkness,” she muttered.

Our fair had five parts. Not that they were divided into specific categories or marked with boundaries, but you could tell as you went from one part into the next. As you left the road and went down the hill, you descended deeper and deeper into the various sections.

The first part of the fair was made up of the place where everyone parked, plus the road, plus a large chunk of food tents. It was always packed full of people of all ages, and it smelled the best too. Cotton candy, funnel cakes, fried anything-you-wanted-to-eat, candy apples—my teeth began to ache as soon as I so much as walked into that area. The lights there were bright as vendors tried to outdo each other with flashing bulbs and gaudy signs. Here everyone was in a happy and smiling stupor brought on by sugar and grease.

Down the hill a short distance—the tents and pavilions were all laid out roughly in rows—you got to the animal pens. Here you could find various award-winning beasts on display: sheep, cows, horses, chickens, rabbits, that sort of thing. The lights in this area were bright and glaring and uniform. Plain white. You always knew when you had wandered out of the food area because the animal area smelled like horse poop, the people had serious looks on their faces as they waited for the judges’ scores, and they all wore overalls.

Past the food, past the animals, were the kiddie rides. Tiny Tilt-A-Whirls and miniature roller coasters roared around slides and the crown jewel of that area, the carousel. Loud, happy carnival music pierced your ears. This far down the hill, the smell of the food was a distant memory. The carnies who ran the kiddie rides had abnormally large smiles and probably doubled as Santa’s creepy elves in the winter. Parents surrounded the rides, pointing and waving and laughing.

Farther down, farther in was the fourth area of the fair. These were the serious rides. The ones that threatened to steal the food you had just eaten at the top of the hill. This area was marked by teenagers hanging on to each other, screaming voices, and large chunks of shadows. Sometimes, if you didn’t pay attention to the general flow of traffic, you would end up behind a ride in some kind of dark dead end.

This area housed the Ferris wheel, the House of Horrors, and anything that spun you wrong-side up or tried to turn you inside out. There the carnies were indifferent, even mean. They sneered when they took your tickets and took pleasure in stopping the rides at the most awkward moments, like when you were upside down. I think they kept track of how many kids they could make throw up, as if it was a contest they held among themselves.

At the very bottom of the hill, past the serious rides, was the “darkness” Mrs. Miller had mentioned. There the trees came up close to the small tents and dark trailers. There, for only one dollar, you could see a woman with two heads or a man with the body of a snake. Old, blind hags would tell you your fortune for fifty cents, or put a curse on your enemy.

When I was in kindergarten, one of my friends was accidentally stabbed with scissors in the art room when he tripped and fell. His blood spilled all over the floor like paint, more blood than I had ever seen. One of the girls passed out, and the art teacher’s skin turned clammy and white as she called for help through the intercom. Later we found out that he had been to the dark part of the fair—who knows what someone his age had been doing there, or if it was even true. The kids all said he had mouthed off to one of the old carnies, who had in turn cursed him, calling down his death, and that the curse had almost worked.

There, among the trees, you could also see the remnants of campfires and tattered tents strung up with the help of low-lying branches. That’s where the carnies lived during the weeklong fair, down at the bottom of it all—the darkest place—where the air smelled of wood smoke and porta potties, and a constant fog drifted like a lazy river.

But when Mrs. Miller dropped off Abra and me, we were still on the sidewalk surrounded by the light and the laughter of happy people eating fair food. She put a five-dollar bill in each of our hands, and we turned to face the fair, our eyes transfixed by the glory and freedom spreading down the hill in front of us.

“Two hours!” she called again with that same old worry in her voice as she drove away.

“Ready?” Abra said. I nodded and followed her.

It had been only forty-eight hours since my mother had died, but I couldn’t wait to get to the fair. I knew the old women were there—I could feel it.

My mind raced. Abra would never disobey her mother and join me if I had to go into the Darkness. How could I get away from her? The words the woman had etched into the table had somehow found their way into me, and nothing could erase them.

Find the Tree of Life.

“What do you want to do first?” Abra asked.

“Bumper cars?”

She laughed and nodded and led the way through the crowd. We would buy food at the end if we had any money left. She reached back and grabbed my sleeve and pulled me along. That first hour passed quickly: bumper cars, the large Tilt-A-Whirl, and finally running into some friends from school who convinced us to join them on rides I was too scared to go on when it was only Abra and me. They ran back up to the street to meet the parent who was picking them up, and Abra and I still had some time left before her mother was going to meet us.

The best part about that night was that I forgot about real life for entire patches of time. Later I would feel guilty about it, but while we were on the rides and screaming and laughing with our friends, for brief moments I forgot that my mom had died. I forgot about the lightning tree. I forgot that my dad waited at home for me, silent and lost. So we ran from here to there and the lights flashed and the sadness inside me receded, like the slipping of the waves as they approach low tide.

“What next?” she asked.

“I could use a break,” I said.

“Me too. How about the Ferris wheel?”

So we wandered all the way down to the bottom of the area where the rides were located, just on the edge of the Darkness. It was getting late, so the line for the Ferris wheel wasn’t very long—it was mostly made up of teenagers hoping to get some time alone with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Eventually Abra and I were in and riding to the top, stopping every few seconds as more people got on.

The Ferris wheel stopped for longer than usual when we got to the top. It always sort of took my breath away, being up that high. I could see Kincade Road, and I followed it with my eyes to the main intersection in town. I could even see the antique store and the baseball field behind it, although the field was mostly dark. Cars were lined up on the street because of the fair, trying to get out of town, and their headlights and brake lights formed a perfect T where Kincade Road ran into Route 126.

I looked the other way, north on Kincade Road into the darkness of the countryside.

“Hey, Abra, there’s your farm,” I said.

“And there’s yours,” she replied.

They looked like lonely outposts, those individual pinpoints of light surrounded by so much night.

I looked closer, down toward the bottom of the fairgrounds, and a strange sense of foreboding filled me. Mrs. Miller had been right to call it the Darkness because it was empty and black. There was something alive about that Darkness, something moving and throbbing. It felt like something barely contained, as if it might break out at any time and take over. My eyes scanned the dim light around the low-burning embers of dying fires, searching for the three women I had seen on Friday.

I saw a few dogs tied to stakes, the kinds of dogs that looked like they would rip your head off first and bark later. There was a group of six tents at the back, under the trees. They caught my attention because their stakes barely held them to the earth. The tents’ canvases flapped wildly in even the lightest of breezes. They billowed like robes.

Then I saw them. Three old ladies, hunched over, worked among those tents. They gathered things off the ground, then threw them into the fire. This sent up writhing flames at each offering. I couldn’t be sure the ladies were the same three from the antique store, not from that distance, but they looked old and fragile, and one of them had a thick stick in her hand that she leaned on.

I tried to memorize the quickest way back to where they were, but the tents and trailers and trucks in that part of the fair made up a kind of scattered maze. If I was going to find that spot, it would be based simply on my sense of direction.

“What do you see?” Abra asked.

“See those ladies?” I said.

She nodded.

“They were in the back of the antique store on Friday, when you and my mom came looking for me.”

“Huh.” She shrugged, and I could tell she wasn’t impressed.

I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I had to tell someone. So I told her what I had seen inside Mr. Pelle’s prep room. I told her what I had read on the table.

Abra’s eyes squinted in thought, her mouth in a straight line. I could tell she understood why it was such a big deal to me. But I didn’t tell her about the one old woman who had drawn a circle around me, the way the stick grated against the stones, the way I couldn’t move when it was completed. I was having enough difficulty believing that one myself. So much had happened since that moment.

The Ferris wheel crept back toward the earth.

“C’mon,” Abra said with resolve. “We need to talk to those old ladies.”

“Really?” I asked. It was something I desperately wanted to do, but when she said it out loud it kind of scared me.

“Hey!” she shouted at the carnie operating the ride. “We’re getting off here.”

He didn’t stop the Ferris wheel, but that didn’t stop Abra. She pulled the bolt that locked the door, opened it, and hopped out of the slow-moving car. I was right behind her.

“Hey!” the man called out. He had a patch over one eye and an unlit cigarette propped in his mouth. It stuck to his top lip when he talked. “You can’t get out when the ride is moving.”

“So kick us off!” Abra shouted back at him.

We ran around the side of the Ferris wheel. That bottommost part of the fair was unofficially portioned off by a line of 18-wheelers parked on a stone lane. We peered between the trucks. It seemed especially dark back there. Somewhere off in the distance I heard voices and laughter from the food section at the top of the hill, but there, as we faced the Darkness on the other side of the trucks, those sounds seemed to be a million miles away.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Abra asked, and even though she was trying to sound brave, fear left little edges in her voice, edges that caught in the air. I stood there, frozen in space, but she took a few quick steps and vanished on the other side of the trailers, melting into the shadows.

I followed her.