The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files) by Frank Tuttle Page B

Leaves crunched. We turned, the three of us, in time to see a nightmare come reeling out of the woods, passing not ten feet from our hiding place.
    It was twenty feet tall. More. It walked on two fur-covered ape legs, had cloven hooves for feet. Its torso was a scaled monstrosity that gleamed oily and black in the moonlight.
    It had arms. Human arms, scaled up, but human. The head was a ram’s, with enormous, wide antlers like the ones of the snow-beasts up north.
    Its hands were clamped over its ears. It ran and stumbled and bleated in agony, bouncing off some trees, toppling others. Its mad goat eyes met mine briefly, and blazed with hatred as it snapped a jaw full of fangs at us.
    Another moment, and it would have been upon us, and we wouldn’t have stood a chance.
    I grabbed Darla. Gertriss was already up.
    “We’re going,” I said. “Right now.”
    The monster fell, tearing at its head and howling.
    We ran. I looked back once, saw Buttercup still dancing atop the riding wheel, amid the cloud of flying things. They were so many and so thick we could barely see her light.
    “Dammit, Buttercup,” I said.
    We ran all the way back to the river.
    We found a tiny two-man fishing boat pulled up on the bank. The three empty bottles of cheap whiskey inside suggested Ordwald was the boat’s previous occupant.
    We set across the Brown in a dead man’s boat. We all hoped to see Buttercup’s faint glow bobbing across the water in our wake.
    But all we saw was darkness, and all we heard, until the gurgle and slap of oars and water drowned it out, was the faint music from the carnival’s carousel, and the occasional screech of Vallata the swamp witch’s mad laughter sounding high above the barren hills.

Chapter Seven
    We set up watch in Mama’s tiny card-and-potion shop.
    Mama surprised me by failing to lecture or preach. She made us tea. She treated the half dozen injuries we’d suffered between us in our mad dash away from the carnival, and then she moved a chair to face her door and she sat in it, smoking a pipe.
    I put my butt on the floor and my back to Mama’s wall. Darla and Gertriss took the other two chairs. Buttercup’s favorite toy, a diminutive human skull still inhabited by a restless ghost, sat on its shelf and whispered all night long.
    My client was dead. I’d watched him fall, and hadn’t done a damned thing to save him. Knowing there was nothing I could have done wasn’t any comfort to me, and wouldn’t be any to his widow.
    Maybe it was time, said a soft little voice in the back of my mind, to take the finder’s eye off my door and take up gardening instead.
    I saw Bertold Ordwald take a bolt to the neck. Part of me wanted to reach down deep inside, see if I could grasp any of the dark magic that sometimes led me to walk with the slilth in my dreams.
    What if I could do more than dream?
    What if the huldra lived on inside me, hidden away somewhere, awaiting that fateful whisper that would set it free?
    The sun touched Mama’s only window with a pale golden glow.
    Buttercup didn’t come home.
    I pulled out my pistol, checked the cylinder for the fiftieth time.
    “You best put that away, boy,” said Mama. “Ain’t gonna do Buttercup no good if’n you charge into that accursed place and get kilt.”
    “She’s stayed out all night plenty of times,” said Gertriss. Her eyes were puffy and I didn’t like the way she kept her arms crossed over her chest. She’d taken a bad fall in the dark, and I was sure she had a cracked rib, or worse. “Anyway, she’s a banshee. They can’t hurt her.” She took in a breath and forgot to hide her wince. “Can they?”
    “I’m not sure,” I said. I remembered the spider-thing scurrying up the riding wheel. Remembered a witch riding a broom through the air. “But even if they can’t hurt her, they might be able to hold her.”
    It had taken Mama quite a while, but she’d figured out a way to bind Buttercup by using a rope made from the tiny