Chapter Twenty-Three

Benjamin

The pages of the journal are dry and brittle, like the tissue-thin leaves of a long-dead plant. In many places, the once-black ink has faded to a muddy brown, blending in with the yellowed paper. At first it seems as though the page is covered in a made-up language only the author was meant to understand. But once I start to see the patterns in the handwriting—the quirky way the author draws out the lines that slash across the letter T, the flourish in her Ms that make it look like there’s an extra hump—it becomes easier to read.

After about an hour, I find the entry we’ve been looking for.

…

Tonight Rebecca cursed her one true love, and there was nothing we could do to stop her. Mother believes in giving someone every possible chance to make the right choice. Even if it sometimes means waiting too long. To that end, Mother insisted I watch over Rebecca, but from the scrying bowl, too far away to interfere. I love Mother dearly, but I hope she knows that her belief that Rebecca would do the right thing is what brought this calamity on all of us.

We poured a bowl of wine and laid down the lines of salt. At first nothing but candlelight shone on the liquid surface. Then fine tendrils of gray billowed up from the bottom of the bowl, long pale arms of mist creeping across the still liquid. Tree trunks, the same as those at the edge of the forest, grew from the billowing clouds, and from them, my sister emerged. Rebecca wound her shawl around her hunched shoulders. The lights of camp glowed across the flat meadow, but they were tiny with distance.

The grass rustled nearby, and she pulled the square of creased parchment from her pocket. Mother guided us through the vision, trees blurring as she spun the bowl and shifted our line of sight, so we could read the note. Meet me at the edge of the woods at midnight. I’ll mark the tree. The sloping, scrawling script was Jasper’s, as was the red silk handkerchief tied to one of the lower boughs of the sprawling oak at the edge of the tree line.

Rebecca ran the raw silk between her fingers, and she pressed the square of crimson to her nose.

A dark shadow, lumpy, tangled, approached her in the dark. Tall grass rippled out as the figure neared her hiding spot. Rebecca twitched forward as if to go meet the new arrival, and her cheeks flushed dark with excitement.

Rebecca took a step forward, out of the safety of the shadows, when a laugh broke the silence of the evening. It was the light, crystalline laughter of a girl. The approaching shape disentangled to reveal not just one person but two—the tall, lanky form of Jasper and the shorter, lithe shape of Susan, the aerialist.

Rebecca froze. The aerialist had been appearing in her visions more and more of late, though she had not been able to puzzle out why. And now she knew.

Jealousy had gnawed at Rebecca the moment the aerialist had joined our troupe. Susan, with her pale skin and sleek blond curls, was the very opposite of Rebecca, and her appearance in that field did not bode well for my sister.

Jasper had his arm draped around Susan’s shoulder, his hand playing with the jet beads that hung from her sleeve. The moment Susan saw my sister, the laugh died on her lips and she came to a halt, Jasper stopping alongside her.

“Rebecca,” he said coolly. Hard lines set across Rebecca’s brow as she realized that Jasper wanted her to find him with this other woman. He had played her like one of the unsuspecting townies to whom he peddled his wares.

Rebecca twisted the handkerchief into a cord, the thin fabric collapsing in on itself until the silk began to strain. “Jasper, I thought we were leaving.”

Susan tried to free herself from Jasper’s side, but he grasped her tighter, his fingers digging into her shoulder.

“You still can, Rebecca,” he said. “We won’t stop you. I know you tire of the carnival. Susan and I came to see you off.”

Tears welled up in Rebecca’s eyes, and my heart ached for her. “But we were starting over. Together.”

Jasper pulled away from Susan but kept her hand firmly locked in his. He wanted her there, as though the other woman would remind Rebecca she had fallen out of his favor. He placed his free hand on Rebecca’s shawl-wrapped shoulder. “Rebecca. Bex. I have been trying to tell you for quite a while now.”

Rebecca shook her head, as if that would keep the words away. The silk kerchief around her fingers could not possibly be wound tighter, but still she twisted. “You were never—”

“I was.” He removed his hand from her shoulder and gripped onto Susan’s hand hard enough to make the girl wince. His gaze was cold and unyielding. “I think you should go.”

The wind rustled the dead leaves clinging to the branches above them, threw the tall grasses around until they made a susurrus I could hear inside the wagon. Rebecca was terribly still. “You were never supposed—”

“Rebecca,” he said, his words like iron, “you’re embarrassing yourself now.”

A twisted fork of lightning struck the oak tree behind Rebecca. The dry wood caught fire, flames licking at the night sky. Rebecca stood in a pocket of wavering air while the flames stretched toward Jasper like eager tongues ready to bring him into their gaping jaws. Jasper scrambled away. Susan was a glittering speck dashing across the field.

Darkness spread across Rebecca’s eyes; a scarlet glow from the flaming tree threw her face into shadow. The handkerchief was twisted so tight it split her skin. Blood seeped through the silk and ran down between her fingers to drip upon her skirt.

“You were never supposed to con me.”

Power from the earth, from the spell she had been silently weaving, from the blood that ran swiftly from her wound filled her up until she radiated with it. For the briefest of moments, her eyes locked with the point in the distance that was me, in this wagon, and it felt as though she stood before me. I was thrown out of my chair into the wall of our wagon. Mother dashed the bowl of wine we had been scrying out onto the ground and knelt over me. Somewhere outside I heard my baby daughter yowling.

“Did she do it?” Mother asked. Every line on her face was softened by the candlelight, but her eyes were hard. Now, far too late, she had resolved to interfere. I only wish she could have come to this resolution before anything had actually happened.

Something tickled at the back of my head and when I pulled my fingers away they were covered in blood, a red that was bright in the candlelight. I nodded. “She cursed him.”

Her lips pressed together. “Then you and I have work to do.”

And so we did.

It was far too late for us to stop Rebecca’s curse—blood magic is the strongest and most vile kind of work—but we could lessen its effect. Rebecca wanted Jasper dead. Mother wanted to bring him back to life. But in that moment, having seen what I had, I wanted justice. And so, as I worked with Mother to try to bring Jasper back, I hoped for him to be punished. I wanted him to be as unfeeling on the outside as he was on the inside. And so, that is how the three of us came together to create this terrible curse. Rebecca killed him. Mother saved him. And I made him what he is.

The following morning, when I realized what I had done, the guilt was nearly too much to bear. And so I spun a charm around the carnival, a protection, so they would guard and help him until he learned the error of his ways and repented.

…

Blank pages follow that first story, a buffer for the horrible origin of the curse. Then pages and pages of the victims followed. Boys and girls who were crushed and trampled and stabbed, making their bodies ready for the curse. It’s too much. I close the book, fiddling with the foxed corners as I gather my thoughts.

“So, some ass named Jasper was the original recipient of the curse.” Emma immediately begins to hunt for his name among records of the many former employees. “He screwed over the twins’ great-aunt, I think, and that’s where this all started.”

Emma runs a pale finger below his name. Jasper Clarke had one of the shortest tenures in the box. It took him a single month to find someone to take his place. The writings are fuzzy here—literally. The ink has faded out to a faint sepia, and it’s hard to read. A few words are legible here and there: “wine,” “pain,” “heart,” but that’s it.

Emma then flips to find the entry for Rebecca, the jilted woman at the start of it all. Her fingers flick through the pages clumsily. It takes longer this time, but then her palms splay over the pages, thumbs and forefingers framing the entry. And then, so quietly I can barely hear her over the sounds of the road rushing beneath us, Emma says, “Oh God.”

Emma’s slender fingers ruffle her hair as she skims over the words again and again. “Rebecca Marx was a fortune-teller, we knew that. She stayed on after she cursed Jasper. And then,” Emma’s voice cracks, “the night Jasper passed on the curse, she rode to the top of the Ferris wheel and threw herself from it. She um…she didn’t make it.”

A frown tugs at the simple lines of Emma’s ruby mouth as she stares out the window. It is the impotent stare of the furious; it has to be, because there’s nothing but Texas fields, fallow and boring, out the window. There’s nothing I can say that will help, I know that much, so I put my hand on hers and wait.

“That…asshole! I can’t believe he… I could never do that… I just…I hate this. And she killed herself. She made this horrible curse and now I feel sorry for her? Somehow? And I’m still so mad at her I could punch her old lady ass. If, you know, she were an old lady. God. Now I feel like a jerk for wanting to punch a hypothetical old lady.”

I want to help but don’t know what to say, so instead, I just rub my fingers over her palm and the back of her hand, thinking I’ll warm it, but realizing at about the same time that there’s far too much of her to try to keep warm. But as soon as I’m about to stop, she leans against me.

Neither of us says anything about the seemingly insurmountable task in front of us. At the same time, now that I know with certainty there’s something other than the cycle of passing along the curse, now that the person in the box means something to me, I have to help. But it all comes back to New Orleans. All our answers are there.

The sun washes against us through the curtained windows, the tall, thin shadows of telephone poles flashing over us. The light goes from a bright sunshiny yellow to the deep gold of the late afternoon.

I don’t want the moment to end. Somehow, without my realizing it, she has become my constant. The steady thrum of the tires on the asphalt is soothing to the point where I drift off into sleep with my head on her shoulder.

Just my luck that I’ve always been a heavy sleeper.

Emma shakes my shoulder, a steady stream of frantic whispers in my ear. Too late, I realize that I can’t hear the road rushing beneath us or feel the steady rattle of the Airstream in motion. I scramble out of the booth, pulling Emma with me. But when the door swings open and my mother steps in the trailer, there’s nowhere to go.

My hand is still tangled up with Emma’s when my mother sees us.