Flannie brings Clarey his harmonica instead of his car keys. An understandable mistake since it hangs on the same hook and is affixed to a chain so he can wear it. He places it around his neck and sends Flannie off again; with one more try she drops the keys at his feet and wins a liver-flavored treat.
On the way to Cannon Beach, traffic moves reasonably fast as the fog clears, and the storm clouds—though growing darker and more ominous as twilight moves in—seem reluctant to dump out their contents. By the time the silhouetted forests spread off to one side of the highway and the beachfront homes and shops appear like whitewashed shadows on the other, it’s ten till seven, much earlier than we expected to arrive.
Recognizing the cars of several students and teachers in a small lot on Hemlock Street, Clarey pulls in and parks next to a glass studio. I see Uncle’s Chevy, but can’t find much encouragement, considering the driver himself is still missing.
Clarey and I open the back of the Subaru and drag out my mural to wrap it in a plastic tarp now that it’s dry. I’m reminded of the spontaneous appearance of the grimalkins and Lark in my scene, and I can’t fight the niggling sense that I’m missing chunks of last night … that something happened I can’t quite put my finger on. And that’s why, ever since, I’ve been off balance—making mistakes. I won’t be able to relax until I see Uncle with my own eyes and we’re all back home, waiting out the night in safety.
Clarey tucks the harmonica on its chain inside his shirt, then hands off his leafy cloak and twiggy gloves for me to carry in the duffel. Rearranging them alongside Juniper’s leftover scones makes me glad I left my paints, pens, and sketchbooks at the boutique to save space.
Clarey lifts the back end of the mural. I lead with the front, my gloved hands angled behind me to hold the panel parallel to the ground, as if it’s a piece of scaffolding between us. Flannie’s collar jingles and her mechanical leg whirs as she trots alongside us. I toss a look over my shoulder and catch Clarey’s troubled gaze within the eyeholes.
“You sure you’re up for this?” I ask.
“I was wondering the same about you,” comes his answer, muffled by the mask.
“Well, it beats being alone.” Recalling what he said back at the boutique—how I’m no longer alone—warms me head to toe like Juniper’s cider, and I’m overcome with gratitude again. I still have that squid ink stashed in the bag on my shoulders. Helping him perfect a new Scourge mask will be the token of my appreciation—once the danger of October thirty-first is behind us.
Chilly, damp gusts finger through my hair, carrying the appetizing scents of local cuisine and brine. I ate one of the gingerbread scones Juniper sent with us but am still hungry enough my stomach would be growling if it wasn’t sunken like a rock.
I glance at the asphalt streets—glistening and black but mostly empty due to dinnertime and the activities drawing people to the beach. I’ve always been captivated by the creative atmosphere here and have taken many a day trip with my uncle and Clarey to visit the eclectic shops and art galleries. At night after a rain shower, the sidewalks and thoroughfares are even prettier—splashes of glitter reflecting the streetlights.
As we navigate a crosswalk to the closest beachside inn then swing around to the back where the pavement stops, the town’s charm fades to the sight of Haystack Rock rising offshore in the distance—a monolithic imprint against the inky sky. The sea stack, over two hundred feet tall, hunches like a beast lying in wait between swirling charcoal clouds and the ocean’s frothy white waves.
In agreeable weather, the volcanic rock is a popular tourist attraction, mainly for its cameo in the opening scene of The Goonies, when the Fratellis race across the beach to outrun the police. Yet to locals and a few discerning visitors, there’s so much more magic happening at the base and on the rock itself.
Even from this distance, the cries of seabirds colonizing the surface vibrate in my ears: the puffins’ growling wails that sound like garbled chain saws; and the shrill kee-ars of the terns. There’s a thin strip of rock and sand that connects the beach to the sea stack at low tides where starfish, crabs, sea slugs, and other intertidal life populate the resultant pools of water.
Lark and I used to come here with Uncle Thatch for afternoon picnics and kite flying. On our twelfth birthday, he brought us late in the day because—although the cave inside Haystack Rock is usually unreachable—the sand levels had risen high enough that people could slip in for some spelunking. By the time we arrived, sunset filtered through the back entrance and flooded the tunnel’s corridor with a pink glow—Lark’s favorite color. Lark and I spent the next half hour squatted on outcroppings in the cave’s jagged interior, counting crabs and starfish. The experience inspired my earliest attempt of a comic about a girl who sprouted gills and fins, and her adventures in an underwater kingdom where glowing starfish lit up the ocean like a night sky. As for Lark, watching the crabs’ hinged claws sparked the idea for the robotic appendages that would later inspire Flannie’s bionic limb.
Desperate to escape the nostalgia, I return my attention to Flannie. She bounds from my ankles to Clarey’s as we take the gradual slope to the beach. Tail wagging, she yips in excitement the instant we hit sand, and I envy her unfettered enthusiasm.
Beach lanterns on tall poles light the way to the carnival in the distance. Flannie trots along the shoreline several feet ahead of us, sand spraying up around her paws as she attempts to herd a couple of terns fighting over some smelly fish the tide uncovered. Before we came, we put on her waterproof snowshoe attachment; it’s the same thickness and shape of her real paws, to allow her mechanical leg to skim across sand—or snow—instead of sinking. However, the circuitry inside the leg joints won’t survive a dousing of salt water any more than Clarey’s calfskin loafers and their metallic toes would.
Before she can get too close to the ocean, Clarey shouts, “Flannie, come!”
She aims a final scolding bark at the birds, then scampers back to us. Our trio veers toward the warm beigy glow coming from the black-and-white circus-style tents clustered along the beach a few yards behind a local resort. In an announcement at school, students were told that the three big tops would have a central height of thirty-three feet and a forty-foot circumference, so they could house a large selection of rides and fundraising attractions.
It’s overwhelming to see the spread in person, knowing we may have to comb each spacious tent, one by one, to find Uncle.
Lightning streaks overhead, and the sky fractures as if we’re inside a black Fabergé egg embellished with electrical netting. Clarey and I break into a wobbly sprint with the mural swaying between us. My biceps and shoulders stretch at their awkward positioning, but I push on. Rain pours down the minute we plunge through the closest tent’s entrance. I glance at Clarey, shaking my head at how close we cut it. The mural would’ve been protected beneath the tarp, but our makeup wouldn’t have fared so well—and we both need our hiding places.
The sugary essence of fresh-spun cotton candy and the greasy balm of crab puffs and funnel cakes overtake the scent of the rain—even before the sounds and sights hit. Flannie lifts her nostrils to sniff the carnival fare.
“Don’t get distracted, poochie,” Clarey says quietly from beneath his mask. “You’ve got a job to do before you can earn yourself some junk food.”
I smirk when Flannie wags her tail in answer and finds her place at her master’s side.
The sweet moment shatters like the sky outside as I take in our surroundings: the lights on the rented games and rides—which should be every color of the rainbow—blink in sepias and grays, as though I’ve stepped into an old-timey carnival documentary. The droning buzz of motors, the grinding swirl of wooden Skee-Ball machines competing with the pop of air guns, and the clack-clack-clack of a thirty-foot drop tower taking passengers up to the central dome of the tent’s roof so they can plummet down at breakneck speed all make me grateful my other senses remain sharp.
Everything presents a gruesome theme, from a Clowns-Go-Round carousel with circus animals—elephants, seals, tigers, and ponies, their heads masked in white with eyes and muzzles blotted black and bulbous noses that I’m guessing are red to mimic evil bestial clowns—to a Bloody-Bits-in-Jars sensory game, where participants blindly stick their hands behind a screen and attempt to deduce what they’re touching … “slimy eyeballs,” “amputated appendages,” or “broken teeth.”
For the first time since losing Lark, I’ve stepped out of hiding and directly into the world of fabricated monsters and synthetic gore. I swore I’d never celebrate this holiday again, yet here I am in the thick of it.
I nibble my lip ring, counting on the familiar metallic tang to calm my nerves, but it’s futile. My heartbeat slams in my wrists and neck—a thrumming that picks up tempo when, to better see all the sights in the tent, we’re forced into the midway, swarmed by a throng of costumes.
There are the traditional Frankensteins, Freddy Kruegers, Draculas, and Jasons; then there are the homegrown tributes: Sloth, Mama Fratelli … the Datas, the Chunks, the Mikeys. Some are wearing Hey You Guys T-shirts, others have donned jackets with the logo Goonies Never Say Die.
In spite of hidden faces, it’s easy to identify strangers by those who gawk at Flannie’s leg as we pass. Our fellow Astorians glance and wave but walk on undeterred.
However, almost everyone—stranger or not—makes a point to compliment the realism of Clarey’s pumpkin prosthetic. He offers the occasional “Thanks, man,” but keeps his head down.
I pause in the midway when two ski-masked revelers—one a ninja and the other a cat burglar with fuzzy black ears and tail—relay excitement at seeing us. I recognize the voices as Jin’s and Brooke’s and set down my end of the mural while Clarey props his on the sand, leaning its weight against him … effectively walling off one side of himself from the crowd. He turns his face into the board, his shoulders raising on shallow breaths.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” Jin shouts over the drop tower’s whooshing air brakes, the carousel’s distorted circus music, and bursts of laughter and chatter. She absently wraps Brooke’s tail around her plastic ninja staff. “And such amazing costumes!” In deference to Clarey’s obvious discomfort, Jin shifts her attention to me. “Dang, those look so real.”
Using the end of Brooke’s tail, she gestures toward the zippers razing my chalky made-up face—one severs my forehead, another my cheek, and the final my chin. Clarey made them by cutting the zipper tape to fit, dotting the white fabric backing with spirit gum, then pressing them into place using tweezers and dabbing on latex texturing before blending the edges into the white makeup. Plumping up my lips with the Ruby Red matte, then adding harlequin-style black triangles around my eyes and a few oozing drops of fake blood along the interlocked zipper teeth, created a ghastly rag doll effect. Nothing too terrifying, but macabre enough to be a creature completely separate from myself … and more importantly, from Lark.
“So what made you come out tonight?” Jin’s familiar enough with my Halloween routine to understand I’m out of my element.
“Had to bring my mural,” I shout back, trying to keep my footing as people accidentally jostle the board. A hand-holding couple with a funnel cake get close enough I can almost taste the sweat, sugar, and greasy smoke emanating off them. I worry for Clarey. He’s stiff as a scarecrow in an ice storm, though Flannie’s doing a great job preserving his personal space by dancing around him. Still, it’s obvious—by the pinched, painted skin surrounding his eyes under the mask—he won’t last much longer.
“Do you know where my uncle set up?” I ask.
“The middle tent,” Brooke answers from beneath her fuzzy-eared ski mask as she wrestles her tail away from Jin. “Right next to the art class’s face-painting stall, just on the other side of the flap.”
I ask one last question while dreading the answer: “And he’s already there, right?”
“No. Mrs. Ruiz is watching the booth, but she doesn’t have anything to sell,” Jin says. “We thought maybe that’s why you came. We haven’t seen your uncle since we got here, and people have been asking. There was a line for a while, but not sure if anyone’s still waiting. Maybe he’s there now.”
“Thanks,” I manage. My thoughts flicker faster than the grayscale lights on the carousel, and my fears escalate until I feel like I’m in a gut-twisting free fall—as if I’m the one descending from the top of the Grim Reaper’s Drop Tower, my spine pressed against a tombstone seat back as we race toward a speedy plunge.
Without a word, Clarey uses the mural between us to nudge me forward.
We resume our two-person hold on the panel and use it to push a path out of the midway and back to the edges of the canvas where the crowd thins, providing a faster route to the middle tent.
“He’s got to be manning a game or something,” Clarey says from behind as my feet shuffle on autopilot. I clench my jaw, because it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as me.
We scutter by a “Haunted Hovel,” basically a temporary shed painted to look like a Victorian manor that houses some prefabricated scares. Eerie music, groaning zombies, moaning ghosts, and hysterical yelps can be heard as the door opens to let in new victims. The seasonal sounds burrow inside my belly, heightening my nausea.
Next, we pass a couple of fundraising booths. The photography class painted a board to look like a giant black widow, with a hole for the spider’s head where people can pose their faces for keepsake pictures—five dollars a sitting. There’s also a line at my mechanic class’s three-dollar-per-try game—a hand-built striker that tests a contestant’s level of scariness by how high they can send the puck up the nine-foot tower with a mallet. There’s Barely Hairy, Fairly Thrilling, Goose Bump Raising, and Spine Chilling.
A customer swings the mallet as we pass. He reaches Spine-Chilling status, and the bell’s celebratory ching-ching-ching reverberates deep in my chest.
Ching: No one’s heard from Uncle since this morning. Ching: He would never have allowed a line of eager customers to go unattended. Ching: He’s not here but his car is.
An icy sensation prickles my skin. What’s happened to you, Uncle Thatch?