Alabaster

She stumbles and almost falls, cracks her left shoulder hard against the trunk of a tree and the force of the blow spins her completely around so that she's facing her pursuers, the few dark boughs left between them and her, and one of the dogs howls. The eager sound of something that knows it's almost won, that can taste her even before its jaws close around her throat.

The light from the box swirls about her like a nagging swarm of nocturnal insects, whirring black wings and shiny scarlet shells to get her moving again. Each step fresh agony now, but the pain in her feet and legs and chest is nothing next to her terror, the hammer of hooves and the baying hounds, the men with their guns and knives. Dancy ca

The electric shock of cold water to rip the world around her open once again, the slow burn before it numbs her senseless, the fire before sleep and death to part the seams; she looks back to see the indistinct, frantic tumble of dog bodies already coming down the steep bank after her. Above them, the traitorous pines seem to part for the beautiful man on his tall black horse, his antique clothes, the torch in his hand as bright as the sun rising at midnight. His pale face is bruised with the anger and horror of everything he's seen and done, and everything he will see and do before the dawn.

"Je l'ai trouvèe!" he shouts to the others. "Dèpêchez-vous!"

Words Dancy doesn't know, but she understands them perfectly well, just the same.

"La bête! Je l'ai trouvèe!"

And then she looks down at the reflection of the torchlight dancing in the icy, gurgling water, and her reflection there, as well, her albino's face melting in the flowing mirror, becoming the long snout and frightened, iridescent eyes of a wolf, melting again and now the dead woman from the Gynander's trailer stares back at her. Dancy tries to stand, but she can't feel her legs anymore, and the dogs are almost on top of her, anyway.

"Is this me?" she asks the faces swirling in the stream. "Is this my face, too?" But this when and where slides smoothly out from beneath her before the light can reply, before snapping dog teeth tear her apart; caught up in the implosion again, swallowed whole by her own disintegration.

"They're all dead," the nurse says, and her white shoes squeak loud against the white floor. "Cops up in Milligan think maybe she had something to do with it."

"No shit?" the orderly says. He's standing by the window, looking out at the rain, drawing circles in the condensation with his index finger. Circles and circles inside circles. "Where the hell's Milligan?"

"If you don't know already, trust me, you don't want to know."

Far away, the beautiful man on his black horse fires a rifle into the night.

"How old were you then?" the psychiatrist asks Dancy, and she doesn't answer him right away, stares instead at the clock on the wall, wishing she could wait him out. Wishing there was that much time in the universe, but he has more time than she does. He keeps it nailed like Jesus to his office wall and doles it out in tiny paper cups, a mouthful at a time.

"Dancy, how old were you that night your mother took you to the fair?"

"Does it matter?" she asks him, and the psychiatrist raises his eyebrows and shrugs his bony old-man shoulders.

"It might," he says.

And the fair unfurls around her, giddy violence of colored lights and calliope wails, cotton-candy taffy air, sawdust air, barkers howling like drunken wolves, and the mechanical thunk and clank and wheeze of the rides. Her mother has an arm around her, holding her close as the sea of human bodies ebbs and surges about them, and Dancy thinks this must be Hell. Or Heaven. Too much of everything good and everything bad all shoved together into this tiny field, a deafening, swirling storm of laughter and screams; she wants to go home, but this is a birthday present, so she smiles and pretends that she isn't afraid.

"You didn't want to hurt your mother's feelings," the psychiatrist says and chews on the end of a yellow pencil. "You didn't want her to think you weren't having fun."

"Look, Dancy," her mother says. "Have you ever seen anything like that in your whole life?"

And the clown on stilts, tall as a tree, strides past them, wading stiffly through the crowd. He looks down as Dancy looks up, and the clown smiles at her, real smile behind his painted smile, but she doesn't smile back. She can see his shadow, the thing hiding in his shadow, its spidery-long legs and half-moon smile, its eyes like specks of molten lava burning their way out of its skull.

Dancy looks quickly down at the ground, trampled sawdust and mud, cigarette butts and a half-eaten candy apple, and "Get a load of her, will you?" a man says and laughs.

"Hey, girly. You part of the freak show or what?"

"'Course she is. She's one of the albinos. I saw the poster. They got a whole albino family. They got a boy that's half-alligator and a stuffed cow with two heads. They got a Chinese 'maphrodite-"

"They ain't got no cow with two heads. That's a damn fake."

"Well, she ain't no fake, now is she?"

And then her mother is shoving a path through the crowd, towing Dancy after her, trying to get away from the two men, but they follow close behind.

"Slow up, lady," one of them shouts. "We just want to get a good look at her. We'll pay you."

"Yeah, that's right," the other one shouts, and now everyone is staring and pointing. "We'll pay. How much just to look? We ain't go

The psychiatrist taps his pencil against his chin and helps Dancy watch the clock. "Were you mad at her afterwards, for taking you to the fair?" he asks.

"That was a long time ago," Dancy replies. "It was my birthday present."

He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, makes a whistling sound between his front teeth.

"We never went anywhere, so she took me to the fair for my birthday."

"Did you know about freak shows, Dancy? Did your mother warn you about them before you went to the fair?"

"What's the difference between freaks and monsters?" she asks the psychiatrist.

"Monsters aren't real," he says. "That's the difference. Why? Do you think you're a monster? Has anyone ever told you that you're a monster?"

She doesn't answer him. In only five more minutes she can go back to her room and think about anything she wants, anything but fairs and gri

"Have you ever been afraid that she took you there to get rid of you, to leave you with the freaks?"

And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spa