Originally published in Vector at the beginning of the year.
October, and a storm is coming. A travelling lightning rod salesman arrives and alerts two young friends to what he senses on the horizon. Throughout the town, others feel the tension in the air. Something is coming. And that night, 3 am, that something is come. Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show: a travelling carnival, promising rides, freaks, wonders and delights. But Will and Jim watch the carnival arrange itself outside town, and what they see unfold that night is not the rosy funfair that the townsfolk find the following day. Soon enough the carnival folk, the twisted slaves captured by Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark over their timeless centuries, are led by their masters in a hunt for the boys who alone grasp at the truth. Alone, that is, but for Will’s reclusive father Charles, a man half-lost in his own past.