Stormy skies at the haunted carnival

an excerpt

(This is an excerpt from my published novel BY THE LIGHT OF THE CARNIVAL, a ghost story, in paperback)

In the next county north, a tall oak tree crashed over a fence as the chilly arctic jet stream blew south and collided with hot winds blasting up from the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, a towering storm front bore down from the west. As the violent trinity collided, ten thousand angry ghosts felt it and took the chance for a mean-spirited joyride, hoping to help nature rip apart a few rural towns.

An updraft began to spin and draw in, gaining speed. A steady blast of warm air rose to meet the currents of dry air from the opposing direction, which had entered the storm from very high altitudes, cooling it. It dropped, making a corkscrew, sheathing the pipe of rising air, further tightening the vortex and accelerating the spin.

Then the storm and its ghosts gave birth to a violent child… a tornado. The funnel dropped out of the rotating front and skittered erratically across the soil, blasting it to bits. The violent child was difficult to steer so it just missed a big red barn and entered an orchard. It crashed into the chicken coop. The cinderblock walls stayed put but the roof dissolved instantly into a puff of small shreds of half rotted wood. With the energy of an atomic bomb on that one spot, many thousands of white feathers sucked up and twirled high into the sky. The tornado fell apart as the feathers caught a pocket of vacuum and sucked even higher.

Frustrated, the storm ghosts dissipated. Nature’s brief power had spent. The real target was missed and the lives of large mammals had been spared. The red barn had been full of milk cows and a girl. She looked out a door and spotted the faint wisps of black Edwardian style coat tails blending with the dark clouds. She said, “Mary Poppins!” but knew it was something menacing.

Rising higher, the ghosts saw a distant carnival and wanted to tear it apart. “Spin! Spin!” they shrieked over the howl of the wind. They drew close again and prayed with all their might to all the storm demons of all time. But the jet stream in their faces wavered and hit them aside, breaking their rotting black coat tails into scatterings of putrid ashes.

*****

A sharp breeze that was now blasting from the north, and a quick plunge in temperature, told Miss Toulon there was terrible weather coming. She pushed her beard down. “Crap! Stop the rides and games.” The merry-go-round began to spin ominously backwards. The snow cone man scrambled after some paper cups that blew across the grass. “Don’t let all our cups go to waste,” she scolded him. Then she turned to Joe and yelled, “Save the posters! Cover them up! Don’t let a drop of rain hit any of them! It’s gonna blow, so cover everything up good! It’s gonna blow like crap! Oh crap!”

Customers hurried to their cars and drove away as dust blew. Pinda had her hands over her eyes as much as she could and still see where she was going. She yelled at Joe, “Close your game!”

“I am! I will.” After the rolls of posters were safe in a black plastic garbage bag under the counter, he hopped over his Star Shoot counter, and fumbled for a while until he unpinned and swung down the aluminum awning. His fingers took a smashing but he locked it down.

Lady Fortuna hurried by. A long lock of the fake part of her black hair kept blowing across her nose. She looked worriedly up at the double Ferris wheel. Pinda walked up to her. “Something terrible is going to hit us!”

She looked up again. “Can this all blow over?”

Pinda grabbed her arm and asked her, “What do the clouds say?”

“What? You want me to read the clouds like tea leaves?”

“Are they full of ghosts?”

Lady Fortuna reminded her, “Everything is always full of ghosts. I just can’t see them.”

Pinda said, “But you’re the fortune-telling woman.”

“That don’t mean I can see them with my eyes. But when there’s a big loud crowd of them, you can’t miss them. I feel something coming at us like Napoleon’s army.”

Pinda asked, “Can you tell if these are ones that would interact with us? Ones that would hurt us! Will they come down to us? Or will they just stay way up there?”

“I don’t feel any ghosts close enough yet to tell. Just a lot of stupid angry air in front of them.” Lady Fortuna folded her hands. “It’s come to punish me, I know. I have to be punished.”

“It’s a storm. It isn’t about you. Are we all gonna get hit? If you can’t see them, then what do you feel?”

Still looking up, Lady Fortuna turned this way and that, and then said, “I hear them. Dead people yelling. And maybe they'll score today! They want us destroyed. I can feel them in my bones. They want us, bad.” She pulled a cross necklace from her blouse and held it up to the low swirling clouds. The gray bones of many fingers popped out of the fronts of them “You want us but you can’t have us. I push you back! I push you back! I push you back! I’m sorry for all the bad I did. Rutguer, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I only wanted to help you. Rutguer, please don’t destroy the whole carnival just to get back at me!”

Pinda gently pushed at her arm. “Stop talking like that. You didn’t hurt anybody. Did you?”