WELCOME TO THE FUNHOUSE
THE TRUCKS SHOW up one afternoon like a parade of chorus girls with dirty knickers. Prancing down Main Street, all cackles and engine revs, purple feathers fluttering from their rearview mirrors. In the dreich afternoon drizzle, they’re as garish as a cartoon. If you have small children (or wayward teenagers, for that matter) you might want to take this moment to stop up their ears with cotton wool and clutch their sticky brat hands tight. The trucks are oh so bright and oh so tempting, and it’s bad luck to start any tale with screeched brakes and an ambulance siren.
Beneath the polished steel tracks of the roller coaster, Gloria the Teller sits high in her cab—webbed fingers splayed on the steering wheel, zebra-print top hat askew. Snuggled on top of a neon waltzer, the Twins hiss secrets and plot in each other’s ears. On their lap, they clutch a metal cashbox with six thousand stolen pounds inside. And in the Haunted House’s truck of ghosts, the Pin Gal props her feet on the dashboard and plays the marimba on the piercings of her rib cage. Her music is jerky and ancient, a windup magic-box song that means everything is about to begin.
When they reach the end of Main Street, the procession snakes around the back of Costcutters, past the bus stop—the place of fag butts, first kisses, and the one escape route out of this town. Miss Maria peers from her specially strengthened lavender caravan and wraps her feather boa tight as three kids scarf the dregs of a bottle of Glen’s. Gobby with vodka, the shortest one raises his middle finger at the caravans and hocks up a swear … but then Gloria the Teller shoots him a wink and the kid freezes as if he’s forgotten what he intended. He’s left holding his finger in the air while the folk in the cabs screech and blow kisses and take the turn toward Jimmy’s field.
The laughter carries them over potholes of broken roads, past the Ladbrokes and the Poundland and the boarded-up shop fronts. Miss Maria’s seventeen chins ripple like belly dancers clad in copper coins and sparkly intent. The trucks jiggle along.
And then there’s Nancy—teen witch, trouble dowser, and human contortionist—sitting in the back of Gloria’s lorry, every surface piled high with mystic altars. As they hit the potholes, things fall: a High Priestess tarot card, a tangle of prayer beads, three baby teeth. Nancy ignores them, too busy leaning out the window, taking in the lie of the land. A green-brown sludge for miles and miles with just a small eruption of streets like a pustule the earth’s barfed out.
But potential. She can sense that, too, beneath it all.
As this Day-Glo horror creeps through Pitlaw, the curtains huff and rustle. These lorries, they’re not your good honest normal lorries. Instead of cable ties or tinned fruit or manure, they’re all filled up with “entertainment” and God Knows What Else. Why, if those painted monstrosities on the side are anything to go by, they must be stuffed with dirty pictures and horror shows and worse! So the townspeople say, as the phones leap and clatter in their cradles. Word of the arrival spreads through the mycelium of the town—gossip erupts in damp-tissue sitting rooms, rumor spores catch the wind. They’re Catholic heathens from the south, so they are, intent on total depravity. No, worse: They’re foreign. It’s not right. Pitlaw may have had a snatch of bother of late, but that’s nothing outsiders can solve. The crops will come back the way they always have. The land will provide. The factory’s still going, isn’t it?
Well, that Jimmy was always a tight bastard, he’d hold a ten-pence piece between his teeth to cure seasickness.
Says the tourism’ll help us all, fat chance!
And speaking of fat, did you see—
Oh, disgusting it is.
A real shame.
Whatever are they thinking?
Coming here, of all places?
The trucks reach Jimmy’s field and circle like wagons, tires gouging fresh brown tracks in the earth. Mr. Partlett slams on his brakes. The procession comes to a screeching halt.
The inhabitants fling open their doors and step out into the wet. Engines hiss and tick. Werewolf Louie angles his face to the sky, hopping from foot to foot, letting rain run rivulets down his fur. Zed offers his arm to Gretchen Etcetera—the world’s most spectacular drag performer—and holds her up, giggling, as her glittered red heels plunge into the soil. The circle gathers around Mr. Partlett, a fat wooden stake in his hands. Everyone makes their faces as eager as puppies in the pound. Pick me, pick me, pick me! In the gray light, Mr. Partlett’s scars are silver and luminous, sardine skin packed in a can. He smiles (the scars twist and bubble), he turns slowly, then he stops and holds the stake out to the Twins.
Four long and greedy arms reach out and grab it. The crowd whoops and hollers. A single pair of legs dip a respectful curtsy. Two identical smiles crack open four identical lips. The Twins are beaming, beatific saints—chosen ones for this summer season.
Here is the spot where things will take root. Shiny metal struts will plunge into primeval dirt. Long-forgotten grudges will be fanned into flame. Chaos and mischief will leak into the waterways, unsuspecting mothers will brew a cup of tea and end up with a bubbling intention to stumble off the narrow. Why not? It’s just trouble after all.
The Twins lift the stake high. Everyone watches, breath held, as it traces an arc. The tip is sharp. The wet wood casts a shadow across the sky. For a moment, everything is still. Even the birds close their beaks.
And then the Twins drive the stake into the earth. The ground splits open to receive it. Just like that, the rain stops. Droplets of water reconsider their life’s true destiny and head back to the sky. Gathered gray clouds puff and disappear like smoke.
A sunbeam spills upon the earth and it is hot and it is holy. A good omen.
The Freakslaw applaud.They have arrived.
DIRT CHARMS
NANCY WAKES AT the crack of dawn. All those other fuckers are still asleep (things got a little skewed after the delirium of the stake, as things always do), but that’s okay. It’s best to be alone for what she has to do in the sickly morning light. She’s all riled up with the electric magic of sixteen-year-old girls, enough energy between her thighs to light up the entire Manhattan grid.
She stumbles out of her crooked red caravan into the field in socks, all wrapped up in a pink Nepalese carpet embroidered with elephants. Gloria the Teller was sprawled on the sofa this morning, and the last thing Nancy wanted was to wake her up rummaging through drawers. So no clothes, save for knickers and knee-high socks that are already sodden with dew. She looks fantastic. Like a filthy witch and a mountain mystic. She ought to be carrying a bow and arrow. A crown made of owl bones and tinfoil and peonies. Something to inspire a little worship.
None of the attractions are set up yet, but the border markers are in place. It’s the first thing Mr. Partlett does: declare the boundaries, lay the land. You’ve got to separate the fair from the world before you invite the world inside.
The thing is, magic needs a base to cling to. Earth for its roots. It’s all very well casting hexes at any opportunity, but a spell without a proper base is like a topsoil plant: nice and pretty, but one strong gust and it’ll blow away. Nancy’s learned this the hard way, and she’s not making that mistake twice.
But that’s the problem with the funfair. What kind of bedrock can you build when every year’s a new destination? It’s one thing to shove a stake in the ground, but sometimes Nancy gets a hankering for really taking hold of a place, wrapping her fingers around its neck.
If you’ve got a house, you can keep it safe by hiding an old shoe in your walls. You can ward off bad spirits by filling a witch bottle with piss and fingernail clippings and rosemary and hair and red wine and sand and rusty screws and feathers and shells and salt and coins and ashes, bury it under the fireplace and count to ten. But what if you’ve got no proper walls? No fireplace? What’s the girl in the caravan to do?
Well. That’s where Nancy’s charms come in.
From her knapsack, she takes a jar of menstrual blood. Six months’ worth, a whole dreary winter of shed innards, the reek of rank and rotted meat. Her blood’s turned brown and there are small globs floating. Really good bits. Nancy paces the perimeter of the field, dribbling an unholy breadcrumb trail. It sinks into the soil, leaving clots like Rorschach ink. To help the grass grow. Attract the bears.
What Nancy really wants is for the land to know it’s hers. Everyone knows the best way to make something yours is to mark it with your stink. And Nancy has the best stink. It’s incredible. Like heavy cream. Animal fur. Bitumen. Roast meat. Sweet rotting tropical fruits. Solar flares. Some kind of industrial, chemical wonderland. A rough rub on sore skin. She smells like a lovely shove in the face.
Or so Zed tells her anyway. And whenever he does, she’ll straddle him and pin him to the ground. Dip two fingers inside herself and stick them under his nose, make him screech like a delinquent lunatic.
But not today. Today, Zed’s asleep—probably thick in hallucinatory dreams after last night—and she’s doing the charms. If nothing else, a stink can serve to distract the previous owners. Like a baby bird rejected the moment you place your hands on it, rubbing your scent over the land messes with the old ghosts. It tells any inhabitants there’s a new bitch in town. And when those ancient voices try to make
themselves heard, Nancy turns stubbornly away.
Once the perimeter’s done, Nancy pads to the hollow where the Houses of Horror and Fun will end up. She kneels in the muck, hiking the carpet under her armpits, and starts to dig. Soil gacks her fingernails. Small rocks dunt her knuckles. But she keeps going. She wants to get deep enough for her magic to seep into the ley lines.
Into the hole, she presses a single baby tooth, white and shiny against the dirt. It looks like a toy, but teeth have got all kinds of power lurking in their enamel. Some witches think your tongue’s magic because it’s the only muscle that lives inside and outside the body at once. Well, what about a bone that’s both in and out of your flesh? That’s teeth for you—bits of skeleton you can trace a finger across. And they don’t stop growing when you die, so she’s heard. Teeth, when it comes down to it, are definitely on her side.
The last charm’s a sweet one: hair. Nancy takes a pair of golden scissors and snips off a lock. Her bad dye job looks like red paint. The hair’s cheap and brittle, but who gives a fuck? She knots four sections around four screws nicked from Zed’s toolbox. These for the compass points. With the aid of a screwdriver and a welter of elbow grease, she secures them in the approximating trees. The screws hold tight. The hair gusts like window-box geraniums.
Done! Nancy dusts her hands on her butt. The charms pulse in place, sending winks to their fellow workers. Just a little apotropaic magic—although that’s a misnomer. Witchery doesn’t work by repelling evil, any more than bug spray works by grossing a mosquito out. All either of them do is mess with the sensors, so the little friend can’t even tell you’re there.
What Nancy has done is make the funfair quiet to bad intent. Not invisible—she’s not as powerful as that—but quiet. And, at the same time, she’s amped up the invitation to anyone yearning to send their ordinary life off the rails. Such a thing is very simple if you know how. It’s like turning up the saturation on a photograph: Everything is suddenly very bright and very tempting.
Nancy sits in the grass with the carpet around her shoulders like a tent. She bends her knee and twists her foot against her cheek, grazing dead skin on her face. The dew soaks into her knickers. The wet crotch makes her think about fucking. For that’s something else the charms will attract: men.
Nancy’s cheeks are studded with the scars of picked spots and her lips are always painted a lickable red and whenever she’s alone with men, she likes to fill them with lies. She tells them the accident gave her synesthesia, and now twos and sevens are purple, and E-minor chords taste like jelly beans. She tells them one time Gloria read her cards and said she used to be an Egyptian queen, and you can still see the snakebite scar behind her left ear. She tells them the second fetus, when it came out, had the beginning of a third eye blinking from its chest—
and, if she’d kept it, it would have been the biggest money-spinner the fair had ever seen.
Men stick around to listen because Nancy, on form, is captivating. Better than Mr. Partlett—better even than Gloria. And eventually she fucks the men, too, because Nancy really, really likes nerve endings. She can never quite believe how good sex feels. No matter how utterly ordinary a man is, there’s just something about taking off your clothes in front of a new human being. Every time, it feels like a baptism. The girls are fun, too, soft skin and suggestibility.
Of course, afterward you can make them do whatever you please.
Nancy drums her fingers on the earth: an old worm-charmer trick to make them think it’s raining. As she gets to her feet, the ground starts to writhe with brown and purple bodies. She darts around them and heads to Zed’s cabin, to pound on his door. ...
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