They had entered the carnival separately. One from the south, one from the east and one from the north. There was a rapid surge through the well-trodden grasses, as if a wind of renewal had suddenly blown them to life. But it was no wind it was the deathly unseen carpet of voles, stoats, mice and freshwater eels, seething through the grassy roots, with the odd crazed bound of a maddened hare cresting the now undulating and awakened wave of green. And any carnie who had seen it might have known some doom was coming, for carnies knew too well what hares brought with them.
But their entry would have been blurred to anyone who saw them, as if they had brought their own lack of focus with them. For accompanying each was a wavering cloud of tiny winged harvesters, each of them more efficient than the most diligent roustabout, needing neither scalpel nor bowl for the reaping that would soon commence. They would soon swell with mildew, grow fat like a blood-consuming tick until their wings could no longer bear the weight of their harvest, and they would flutter to the ground like exhausted grey parrots, to be harvested in turn.
Burleigh’s entrance brought, to him, the most conflicting of emotions. He recognised the disused, sagging petrol pump and the field of crushed grass beyond. He had been there before, he couldn’t remember how many times. But any tiny flutter of sentiment was nothing to the rush of ennui that flooded him when he entered the carnival stalls. He had missed it, and he now felt the full force of his missing. With the missing came anger, a kind of fury and more than fury, a full-blooded, overwhelming urge for revenge. They had come for the mildew, he knew, the full harvesting, the reaping that would refine it into spice, and he remembered the sorry classifications the unfortunate Walter had made in his school copybook all of those years ago with his ink-stained fingers. Every emotion the carnies evoked rendered its quotient of mildew. But of all those emotions, terror rendered a crop that was quite off Walter’s scale. So in his confused welter of ennui, anger and subdued revenge, almost as confused as the buzzing of wings around his bent head, Burleigh realised the dreadful reckoning was coming. Burleigh thought to savour this moment of anticipation. To relish it. To engorge himself in this cloud of impending. So he moved through the stalls and each stall brought a different memory back. Past his Hall of Mirrors, which he couldn’t bear to enter, since the sight of himself might bring him to bursting. Into the mid-morning shadows of the circus tent, down through the bleachers, where he saw Monniker cracking the whip, putting his Arabians through their paces. He saw stains on his gabardine coat, and realised it was drenched in sweat. He slipped it off, and slid out, knowing there would be many more reasons to sweat on this day.