The Carnival had a rhythm, a pulse that thrummed beneath the gaudy lights and peeling paint. It was a living, breathing beast, and Sámiel was its dark heart. His horror show was the stuff of whispered legends, a macabre dance that left audiences both terrified and enthralled. But tonight, as he returned after a three-day absence, the beast felt... off.
His boots crunched against the gravel, the familiar path leading him to the cluster of trailers that housed the Pekelniak family. These weren't the sleek, polished RVs of the well-to-do, but battered, weather-worn boxes on wheels, their exteriors adorned with trinkets and talismans meant to ward off whatever spirits might be lurking. The scent of fried onions and stale beer hung in the air, a testament to meals shared and stories told.
Sámiel stood out here, a peacock among crows. His attire was a deliberate affront to convention: a pleather jacket in a shade of crimson that bordered on obscene, a ruffled shirt unbuttoned just enough to hint at scandal, and trousers so tight they seemed painted on. From a choker on his throat dangled a silver knife charm. His dark hair was a wild mane, streaked with unwashed greasy strands that caught the dim light, and his eyes— those eyes—were kohl-rimmed windows to a soul that reveled in the delicious discomfort of others.
He approached the largest of the trailers, its door slightly ajar, revealing the warm glow within. Stepping inside, he was met with a tableau of familial chaos.
"Look what the cat dragged in," sneered Tereza, his older sister, from her perch by the tiny stove. Her arms were crossed, flour dusting her hands from the dough she’d been kneading. Her face, lined beyond her years, bore the perpetual scowl of someone who'd long given up on pleasantries.
"Missed me, did you?” Sámiel drawled, a smirk playing on his lips.
"Hardly," she shot back. "But your audience did. Three nights without your little freak show. People talk."
"Let them," he replied, unperturbed. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
From the corner, a soft chuckle emerged. Josef, their father, lounged in a threadbare armchair, a cigarette dangling from his lips. His eyes, milky with age and too much homemade liquor, regarded Sámiel with a mix of amusement and something darker.
"You always did have a flair for the dramatic," Josef rasped. "But even the best performers know not to keep the crowd waiting too long."
Sámiel inclined his head, acknowledging the rebuke. "Noted, dear father.”
A sudden movement drew his attention to the small figure darting toward him. Aneta, his niece, no more than six, with wild curls and eyes too big for her face, latched onto his leg.
"Uncle Sámiel! Did you bring me something spooky?" she demanded, her grin missing a front tooth.
He laughed, a genuine sound that seemed almost out of place. "Always, little one." From his jacket pocket, he produced a small, intricately carved wooden spider. "This is Aragog. He'll keep the nightmares at bay.”
Aneta took the token with reverence, her eyes wide. "Thank you!"
Tereza huffed, wiping her hands on her apron. "As if she needs more reasons to be scared."
Sámiel's grin widened. "Fear is a gift, dear sister. It reminds us we're alive. Relish it, while you can.”
The door creaked open again, admitting Marek, his younger brother. Sweat slicked his brow, evidence of a long day's labor setting up tents and repairing rigging.
“I saw you walking in,” Marek said, not unkindly. "Vas family’s in a tizzy. Roza and Esper took off."
Sámiel's interest piqued. The Vas sisters were... intriguing. "Ran away, did they?”
Marek nodded. "Few nights ago. No word since. Their folks are tight-lipped, but you can see the worry."
"And the others?”
"Some say good riddance. Less competition. Others are concerned. We look after our own, mostly."
Sámiel licked his top lip with a swipe of a pierced tongue, a habit when he was deep in thought, and clicked the barbell against his teeth. The Carnival was a web of alliances and rivalries, a delicate balance of camaraderie and competition. The disappearance of the Vas sisters tipped that balance.
"Perhaps I'll take a stroll,” he mused aloud. "See what the night has to offer.”
Josef's gaze sharpened. "Don't go stirring the pot, boy."
Sámiel met his father's eyes, a devilish glint in his own. "Who, me? I dream of nothing less.”
Evening was when the carnival truly came alive, but from the sequestered caravans its revels were muffled and distant. Lalitha rarely performed for it now; it was home in name and blood, but little of her spirit remained. Since the Anchor her life had become a thing completely out of phase with her family and roots. Here, she was a pariah cast out by Renáta Vas’s ill fortune, severed not only from Dominik, but from any kind of future. Tradition was too important to cast aside, after all. But neither did she find any true place of her own in the city they had settled in. Just today she’d been moved forcibly on from busking on Old Arbat, too Roma for polite society – because she refused to buy a licence for a bit of ground, like such a thing could truly be owned.
Outcast from two worlds, and still she couldn't leave this one.
“Stop thinking about it, Litha.”
Ceija glanced up from the buzzing needle. They sat on the Vero steps, her cousin bowed over her arm as she added to the disparate story of tiny tattoos growing there.
But it was hard not to dwell. Roza and Esper’s grand exit had been abuzz amongst the tents the last few days. The carnival did not cater for privacy, and the most prevalent rumour suggested Renáta had finally caught them naked together. Plenty of people had heard the yelling at least, and the girls were definitely gone. Hardly surprising, given how close they’d always been. The crueler parts of Litha were immensely glad for the Vas’s public shame – that Renáta lost a true daughter, when she could not accept a Vero one once. The softer parts were simply glad to see them free. Who needed that kind of judgement.
“Has he said anything?” She knew she shouldn’t ask, but he and Ceija were friends – still, despite everything. She’d caught glimpse of Dominik a few times since, but what was she supposed to say? Congratulations to your sister who had the balls to do what you didn’t? She couldn’t stem the bitterness, but nor could she ignore the yearning. He would have confided in her once.
Sámiel wandered.
Not with purpose, nor with haste, but like smoke curling from a dying ember drawn by the night’s quiet breath.
The Carnival was half-asleep and shivering beneath its winter coat. Might as well have been muttering to itself. Ropes creaked on weather-beaten tents. Painted signs cracked with frost. The midway lights buzzed and flickered like fireflies caught in jars too small for flight. The scent of scorched sugar and burnt oil hung on the air, undercut by the tang of melting snow and the smell of rust.
Somewhere a violin screeched in minor thirds, drunk on its own sorrow.
Sámiel moved unseen, though not unacknowledged. A few carnies gave him nods, wary or amused. He was not strange here, merely known. Like a cracked mirror hung in a hallway: no one questioned why it stayed, only what it might reflect. The fracture of reality.
He paused near a heater bolted down beside a popcorn stand, its heat straining but alive, the flames inside dancing like spirits behind bars.
“Cold night for ghosts,” he murmured.
From his coat he withdrew a thin joint wrapped in waxed brown paper. He cupped his hands, shielding the lighter’s tiny flame from the jealous wind, and lit up. The first inhale filled his lungs with the slow, creeping warmth that no fire could mimic. The second wrapped his mind in gauze, softening edges, quieting the world.
Beyond the bleachers, across the half-frozen mud, sat the Voz family trailers. Their windows glowed with false cheer, too bright, too brittle. Sámiel watched them from the dark like a fox regarding a henhouse. Not hungry, but curious.
Roza and Esper had vanished. He chuckled to himself.
Why?
He turned the thought over, rubbed it between mental fingers like a coin worn smooth. They had always flirted with the idea of escape, like most did. But few did it. Fewer still made it out alive. The Carnival had gravity. It pulled you in, made you part of its myth. The only way to leave clean was to vanish entirely. No footprints, no echo. Of course, there was always death.
He pulled deeper on the joint. Smoke spiraled from his lips, lazy and listless.
No. He wouldn’t leave. Not really.
He never stayed anywhere long, but never really left either. He was driftwood, carried by black tides, bumping up against piers and strangers' shoes but never moored. It was like the flicker of memory stirring faint and untethered. The idea of a home. Not a place, not even a face. Just the warmth of purpose. The shape of belonging without the name.
A memory of a memory. And probably not even real.
He exhaled sharply through his nose. The Brotherhood came to mind. The tricks. The blood-slick performances. The ritual laughs and ritual absurdities. It had amused him then, the pageantry of it all. But the thrill was gone now. It felt... irrelevant.
Maybe everything did.
A dog barked in the distance sharp and sudden. Sámiel’s eyes flicked toward the sound. Just a mutt chasing shadows. He rolled the joint between his fingers and let the silence settle again. Behind him, laughter erupted from the firepit near the Ferris wheel. Red-faced men and women roasted sausages.
He stayed in the shadows. Alone felt better. Smoke on a winter night, he thought, that’s all I am.
The last of the joint crackled to ash between his fingers.
He looked up at the sky. No stars. Just a low gray ceiling, like the heavens had hung a shroud over the world and decided not to look down tonight.
Fine by him.
She could feel Ceija’s pity in the brief glance of her eyes, and then her cousin bowed her head a little deeper and renewed her attention on the art until there was only the buzzing of the needle between them. Litha didn’t know if that silence meant a no or a yes, but she did know it meant Ceija would not share either way. They were united by blood and Dominik was just her friend, which seemed unfair, but truthfully Lalitha wasn’t that interested in the answer. She’d just wanted the excuse to talk about him for a bit.
After the work was done and Ceija packing away her tools, Litha stood and stretched out her limbs on the wagon’s steps. Darkness pooled and the bite of cold was hard and unforgiving. The carnival’s lights were like dying embers. Winter was not a great time for them. Any other year they would have packed up for warmer climes long ago, but things had changed after the Sickness began picking off the young people. Why they didn’t move again now Lalitha didn’t know. Something Renáta foretold, most likely. The thought made her inwardly roll her eyes.
Ceija declined the invitation to find out what the night offered. Litha could hardly blame her, it was cold and grey out, but the idea of curling up to sleep in the tiny room she shared with the twins felt like a waiting tomb. She had always been a night owl. If the carnival was too quiet perhaps she’d wander beyond the boundaries to explore the city, though the burn of this afternoon’s rejection still tasted a little sour. Foremost she searched for something to warm herself.
The alcohol always unlocked something inside her, the key to some mystical kingdom which seemed duller without it. The power had the same otherworldly essence but never the same promises of freedom. Her desire to escape the carnival warred endlessly with the comforts of home, a future denied but still not fully relinquished. She was still waiting for Dominik to change his mind, uncertain she’d ever actually accept being second choice even if he did. Perhaps she only loved a memory and not a man now, but no one else compared either. Maybe she’d wait forever.
She’d been about to join one of the fires when she stumbled on Sámi in the shadows. The scent of weed clung like a halo around him, and his gaze was dark as the moonless night. Lalitha didn’t have to wonder what he’d been looking at; she spent enough time of her own glancing out mournfully at the Vas wagons to know exactly where they lay across the blanket of darkness. She’d never presumed he was actually close with either Roza or Esper, but then Sámiel was a walking mystery and rife with contradictions. Litha suspected he preferred it that way. Maybe he was just wondering how they’d managed to cut the cord. Privately she thought they had not. Even her own mother disappeared once, but the carnival drumbeat still drew her back even years later.
Her eyes were already luminous from the bottle wrapped in her hand, though she was more merry than drunk. She read well enough that he would prefer to be alone, but she didn’t care. If he bit she would only bite back. The alcohol swished as she tipped the bottle in offering, a little on the ground like a sublimation, and then held out for him to take. She was grinning, and it was quite clear she wasn’t sober, but that was entirely normal for her, especially at this hour. Her other hand grabbed at one of his to pull him forward. Not into the fire and merrymaking behind, just out into the tableau of darkness he had chosen for himself. There was always a chorus in her head and she moved to that private beat, uncaring that he couldn’t hear the music.
Oh but there was music. It was hard to hear, no shit. But it was there: the crunch of trash burying in the gravel by feet, the whirl of a wind carrying diesel and decay, and the symphony of flies buzzing above a pile of ravenous maggots. It wasn’t the most beautiful of songs, but it was endless.
He let the joint dangle between his fingers, smoke curling up like the ghost of innocence.
And then. Contact.
When the hand snatched his, the body followed unbidden, and slowly but surely writhed to the beat of the song.
The song.
He mouthed her name like a sacrament: Litha.
Little lethal Litha.
The bottle passed between them, her grin catching the glint of the heater’s flame. He drank without question, the burn familiar, a kiss from a benevolent god. His tongue ran across his teeth in anticipation, savoring the sting more than the taste.
His mood was fetid, but it didn’t stop the body from contorting into the motion resembling a dance so long as a partner mirrored the motions. The imagination whiffed an idea through his mind, numb and empty as it was, of carnality and the taste of reckless abandon, but it would be passionless. There was far greater satisfaction in chasing the wilds itself. Not to tame it, but to join it.
A low chant threaded from his lips, syllables of no known tongue, some bastardization of Romani and old Carnival dialect. A fevered imitation of Manouche riffs filtered through a foggy mind. The song built itself from nothing: breath, beat, bone. It poured through his limbs like mercury, like heat, like lust, until the dance became a possession.
His coat hit the dirt. The chill snapped at his skin, but he barely felt it.
He spun, hair whipping like black pennants in a hurricane. His grin cracked wide, teeth bared, tongue tasting the air as if the wind had flavor. With a sudden crouch, he slapped his thigh. Crack! And let loose a howl of the playfully insane. Wild and deranged. A sound that might have summoned spirits in some other age, when gods still walked in ragged furs and begged for blood beneath full moons.
She wasn’t surprised he followed her lead. Most people had trouble saying no to her, and even if he had tried, Litha was an infection. Playing with Sámiel in this mood was like coaxing a game with the darkness itself, or at least the beasts that dwelt within it. As he pulled deep from the bottle there was a glint in her eye that was part the flush of intoxication and part natural inhibition. She let go of his hand the moment she tugged him forward – he already got the point, and she wasn’t offering comfort for whatever bothered him tonight, just an outlet. When it truly came down to it, everyone was alone. Sámi of all people knew that just as well as she did.
Her feet stamped a beat into the dirt. Her hips rotated as she spun, arms aloft and uncaring. The shadows were set dressing, not somewhere to hide, and she used the meagre light naturally to her advantage. Yet if Litha was a woman who knew how to move her body and possessed a performer’s sensual control, she did not seem to concern herself with only looking pleasing. She was fast and free, and the more enmeshed Sámiel became in the ramshackle growth of music, the more wildly primal her movements and expressions grew. The rest of the world was obsessed with order. The Custody spread its vision for society like cancer. They all spoke the same language, dreamed the same dreams, aspired to the same white noise. Be beautiful, be rich, be powerful. Even the carnival had its traditions, but at least it embraced the dying embers of its wildness.
Sámiel’s chant threaded through her, and she lived in it, built on it – not just in song but in story. Her voice wove a macabre melody beneath and through his lead; trills and ululations and wild unbridled laughing when it suited her. Lalitha was a faerie’s dream. She’d dance until she was lost to it. Until her feet were nothing but bleeding stumps. All for that brief moment when freedom felt like a promise rather than trickery. It was the only thing worth wanting.
Despite the freezing cold she felt the sweat begin to bead on her skin. The sounds they made carried out into the mundane night, but no one came to investigate or watch. Maybe no one dared as the frenzy grew beyond performative to something frighteningly transcendental. It was absurdity and meaning. Emptiness and claiming. A vortex which would have consumed anyone foolish enough to wander close.
When he slapped his thigh with a deafening crack, Litha spun a final time and dropped like her strings were cut. For a moment she lay like a limp doll sacrifice, the echo of Sámiel’s deranged howling filling her ears as she caught her exhilarated breath. There were no stars above. Just crushing blackness. The power hummed maddenly at the edges of her senses, lost now, leaving only the unquenchable yearn for more. More what she wasn’t sure. Her head was spinning a little, but even that wasn’t enough to sate. Maybe Sámiel was the infectious one. It made her laugh.
Her strings cut and the rag doll crumpled. The earth received her like an offering, and he stood over her, chest heaving, arms slack at his sides like the moment after a kill. He was drenched in sweat and something that crawled under his skin and scratched to get out. He had to clench his jaw just to keep from laughing. Or maybe screaming.
The wind rushed past them again, hard enough to rattle the rusting metal signs behind the food stalls.
He looked down at her, limbs sprawled across the dirt like a desecrated saint, her chest rising and falling as if she’d stolen air straight from the gods. She glowed in the aftermath. She always did. He crouched beside her, slow and feline.
One finger, tattooed with the skeletal spine of a serpent, reached out and traced an invisible line from the hollow of her throat to her collarbone. He didn’t touch her. Just hovered. Let the heat of his hand barely ghost the skin.
“You know,” he rasped, voice hoarse from the cold, “they used to burn people for less than that.” His smile was teeth. Not unkindness. Not lust. Just bare. Like a skull under flesh.
“I think we scared the ghosts away.”
The cold was chewing at the sweat on his back now, leaving little ice-pick kisses along his spine. Still he didn’t move, didn’t fetch the coat. He didn’t feel human enough for coats. Not yet. Not while the blood was still humming like a chorus of hornets in his veins. That damned music still lingered in the air. He could hear it, even if the night had swallowed its instruments.
He dropped onto his haunches fully, knees bent like a creature mid-transformation. “What do you think, Litha? Are we prophets now? Or just very enthusiastic madmen?” There was laughter in his voice, but something also serious. He plucked the bottle from the dirt and drank deeply. When he offered it back, his eyes never left her face. Those kohl-rimmed things saw too much and cared too little. Or maybe it was the other way around.
“You’d make a good witch,” he murmured. “An old, wild one. Like Baba Cloantza or Baba Yaga. I’d worship you.” But his voice cracked on the last word, and he clicked his tongue as if to punish it.
And then he laughed, sudden and full-bellied, pitching back onto the dirt beside her, arms sprawled to either side, stomach heaving in and out like tissue paper on the wind. He stared up at the nothing sky, shaking out his sweaty hair.
“...Or maybe we’re just high as hell.”
The sweat cooled quickly and immediately began burrowing reality’s cold claws. Yet like a piece of art Litha didn’t move from her fallen sprawl, not for a long time after; hair askew, limbs twisted where they had landed, breathing hard in the dirt. The remnant of the moment still lingered and she wasn’t keen to let it go, and definitely not with an audience staring down from above like heaven’s eyes. Though she wasn’t looking back at him but upwards at nothing, glazed as the afterglow faded.
When he bent like a withered tree to trace a line just shy of actual touch, her eyes finally moved to find him in the mortal plane. Sámiel looked like a skull in the dark. She didn’t move. Shallowed her breath like it was a knife not a finger. They’d known each other their whole lives and she wasn’t afraid, but it didn’t make him safe either. It was one of the things she liked about him though.
Her lips only twisted an amused smile for talk of burning. Unapologetic. Her eyes slitted sly.
“Hm, no,” she said at leisure, once he'd returned to squatting beside her like a predator. “I think we honoured them. Tonight they sleep soundly, knowing not all of us have forgotten them. Listen to them shiver and sigh over their full bellies as they drift back into the deep.”
And maybe the wind had become a little softer; an exhale more than scream. Or maybe not.
She pushed herself up to accept back the bottle and tipped it to drink with abandon, aware he was watching her and watching him back, uncaring. It burned pleasantly, pushed swimming heat into her limbs. She felt like she could float away. Some dribbled from the corners of her lips, in part because they pursed into a smile for the attention. Her eyes didn't waver from his. He was always two things, never certain between them, always searching.
“I think that is a trick question, Sámi. There is no difference.” She chuckled, used her tongue to lick the wet corner of her mouth. The bottle she placed between them, wedged it in the dirt amidst the drifting litter and stale popcorn. Always searching. But never finding.
Great Mami taught her all the Vero’s secrets, if a little begrudgingly because of her didikai roots. She loved that world of secrets and sometimes it felt powerful, like sneaking a glance beyond the veil. But other times it was just hollow mummery given substance from zeal. It was always as real as you believed it was, which was no answer at all. Lalitha was gravely superstitious as a person, but also sceptical of trickery. Her own life was turned sour by it, after all. Did she believe Renáta was right? Sometimes. But the truth was it didn’t matter. There was no way to prove her wrong.
At the witch comment she practically cackled in delight, head thrown back. Her laughter was easy. She glowed from the praise of being considered something so wildly fearsome. If that was what worship felt like she craved more of it. A stage surrounded by thousands, or a stage of dirt shared with a childhood friend, it made no difference to her. It was the act itself; unearthly, magical. Uncontrolled.
He fell back, laughing like a madman. Or perhaps like a prophet. “We are not nearly high enough,” she told him earnestly. Then she made a grandly sweeping gesture at the black sky above and fell back herself, laughing too. “Tonight we are so beautiful and terrible even the gods have closed their eyes. No sins count tonight.” She twisted onto her side, propped her head on her arm. The fingers of her other hand began idly tapping the glass bottle. She wasn’t often a still person, and especially not in this mood. “So tell me a secret, Sámiel. Something you’ve never told another soul.”
Sámiel lay in the dirt like a king on a bed of ashes, eyes half-lidded, watching the dark sky for signs that even the gods had blinked. Lalitha’s laughter still rang faintly in his ears, like bells made of bone, and somewhere behind that the real music began again. From the world itself.
He let the quiet spool out a little longer, just to listen. To feel. And there it was.
The click of a beetle’s wing somewhere in the underbrush.
The creak of cooling metal from the ferris wheel behind the midway.
The shiver of dead leaves stirred by the wind’s return.
The crackle of paper trash curling toward a nearby heater’s flame.
The tap tap tap of Lalitha’s fingers against the bottle.
A chorus, not of voices, but of things. Old things. Forgotten things. The world’s debris whispering its secrets when no one else is listening.
“You are right,” he muttered. “We fed them tonight.”
He smiled without meaning to, pondering the them that feasted, and turned his head just enough to glance sideways at Lalitha. Her eyes glittered, still drunk on madness, and her grin was all teeth and mischief.
He gave a sigh, long and low, more amused than reluctant.
“Do you hear them?” he murmured. “They’re still speaking. Not the dead. The... others.”
His hand drifted through the air above them as if sculpting something invisible. “The beetles are singing. The spiders are spinning songs into the rafters. The world’s full of little horrors with their own lullabies. People just stopped hearing them.”
He twisted to look at her, shirt open and stained with sweat and dirt. His expression sharpened not serious, but electric. Possessed by the thrill of a new idea, not entirely his own.
“A Chorus of Bones. That’s what I’ll call it. Ahh yes. My next show."
His voice had taken on a different edge now, lower, almost reverent. The performer was returning, but this was not his stage persona. This was the maker. The summoner.
“One night only. I’ll build it like a passage through the dark. A path that sings back at you.” His hands were moving again as if sketching shapes in the air, spinning the idea into flesh. “Rooms filled with whispers and insect wings. Threads of spider silk that tangle around the ankles. Ash underfoot. You’ll hear the voice of a thing older than language. A spirit without form. A hunger without shape. In the music, you'll hear your own personal song.”
He picked up the bottle again, took one slow sip, then set it gently beside her hand.
When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, but no less playful for it.
“A secret.”
He pondered what secrets hoarded in his soul that he might share.
“I give everyone a name,” he said simply. “Little ones. Pet names. I never say them out loud. Not even to myself.”
He tilted his head toward her, and his hair, still damp, slid across his cheek.
“Do you want to hear yours?”
Lalitha watched him fervently, eyes aglow. Her head was propped easily on his fist, hair askew about her shoulders. The bracelets Uncle Fennix made slipped down her wrist, charms dangling like ice against her skin. Yet for now the cold was forgotten. She shifted easily from performer to audience, and there was a delighted intensity to the way she watched; every blink, every twist of his hands in the shadows. Inspiration was a pleasure to behold and she drank of it as deeply as she had the alcohol, just as profoundly fulfilled. Sámiel’s words wrapped like velvet. Litha was drawn into the world he created: a song of the forgotten, the outcast, the maligned. Or at least so it sounded to her.
She relinquished her tune on the bottle as he claimed it for another sip. By that point she’d almost forgotten she’d even asked him for a secret. It had only been diversionary anyway, a desire to draw him out, to taunt at the perpetual mystery of him. When he said it was something he never spoke aloud though, even to himself, she felt a superstitious chill in her spine which had nothing to do with the cold. It felt like a thing she shouldn’t ask or ever know. Had she been sober maybe she would have heeded that caution, laughed it away, but it only held her spellbound. She suspected a trick, but it was still a game she wanted to play, so of course she said yes.