“Right.” He nodded, as if to convince himself. “It’s growing, I think.” He scratched his head, his long fingers tangling with his stringy hair, and looked back at the swamp. “It’s getting bigger. I mean, I know it’s gotten bigger since the Choctaw Nation moved on.”
“Bigger?” I echoed.
“It used to be a river, but the silt slowed it down, and now it’s a nearly stagnant tributary.” Leonid stared out the window at it. “The water used to move through, but now it just sits.” Then he turned back to us with a too-wide smile plastered on his face. “But it’s just like you said. Just because it’s powerful and supernatural don’t mean it’s dangerous.”
But he gulped when he said it, like he wasn’t quite sure he believed it himself.
17. mad river
The midway opened at ten, but our part of the carnival—the sideshow with the acts and the oddities museum—didn’t start until four, when more of the crowds began arriving. We’d gotten back from visiting Leonid a little before three, so Gideon called a meeting at the top of the hour.
With the cheerful music wafting over from the rides, we gathered in the middle of the campsite. A few lawn chairs had been set in a circle, and my mom sat front and center next to Betty Bates. I felt wired, like an electrical current was running through my legs, and I didn’t think I could sit if I wanted to. So I stood off to the back, next to where Roxie, Hutch, and Luka sat on top of a picnic table.
Just before the meeting was set to begin, Tim Phoenix hobbled out of his trailer. A beige Ace bandage was wrapped tightly around his knee, and Luka leaped off the table and rushed over to help him.
“What happened?” Luka asked him in a frantic whisper as he hooked an arm around Tim’s waist.
“I just fell during practice.” Tim tried to shrug it off as Luka helped him to a seat. “It’s nothing.”
It would be nothing, if Tim was an average acrobat. But he wasn’t. Tim, his older brother, Brendon, and Brendon’s daughter, Alyssa, all had the power of levitation—meaning they could float, suspended high above the ground, from sheer power of will.
In all the years they’d been traveling with us, I’d never once known any of them to fall.
“Are you all right, Tim?” Gideon asked. He’d taken his position, standing in front of us, and his dark eyebrows pinched as he studied Tim.
“Yeah, it’s just a sprain.” Tim shrugged again. “I’ll be fine for the show tonight.”
“But you fell?” Gideon pressed. “While you were performing?”
“Yeah.” Tim shifted in his chair, and his face began to redden. “I lost my grip, and then I just … I couldn’t catch the air, I guess.”
Gideon seemed to consider this for a moment, then he shook his head, clearing it of whatever had been filling it. As he surveyed the crowd, his eyes were light blue, and I found some relief in that.
“As you all probably know by now, I visited with Leonid Murphy today,” Gideon said, speaking loudly as he addressed the carnival. “There have been strange things going on here. Those of you with extra senses have most likely felt it.”
People began murmuring then, adding their own stories to the ones I already knew—my mom’s excessive mania, Gideon’s faulty divining rod, Roxie’s weak fire. Luka said that his badly scraped knee had healed up just fine yesterday, only to reopen for a while this morning before healing again.
Even those without extra senses, like Betty the Bearded Lady and Zeke the Tiger Tamer, complained of problems. Betty had been having headaches, and Zeke had been having nightmares.
“Maybe that’s what happened with Seth,” Tim said, his voice just above a whisper. “Maybe his strength went out the same way my flying did, and he couldn’t fight off whatever attacked him.”
“So we’ve all felt it?” Gideon asked, drawing everyone’s attention back to him. “Leonid thinks this strange energy comes from the water here, specifically the swamp and tributaries that surround Caudry.”
“What is it?” Betty asked, her usually confident voice trembling.
“Is it dangerous?” Brendon added.
“Leonid claims it isn’t, and he’s been living here for some time, as have the people in Caudry,” Gideon explained as best he could. “With our extrasensory abilities, I believe we’re more sensitive to it than the average townsperson.”
“What about Seth Holden?” Brendon’s wife, Jackie, asked. She sat clutching their young daughter in her lap. “What happened to him? You can’t say that that wasn’t dangerous. And Blossom Mandelbaum is still missing.”
“Blossom isn’t ‘missing.’” Roxie used air quotes. “She’s just … not here. And if this energy or whatever is affecting all of us, it had to have been messing with her, and her telekinesis is extrasensitive. She probably got agitated and took off to hang out at the music festival. She’ll be back before we leave.”
“You don’t know that,” Jackie said, her voice growing sharper as she spoke. “And that still doesn’t explain Seth.”
“It stands to reason that if the energy is affecting us, it’s most likely affecting the tigers,” Gideon replied carefully.
Zeke was instantly on his feet. “My tigers would never do this!”
“Zeke, calm down,” Gideon said. “No one is saying your tigers are at fault. Whoever spray painted my trailer probably thought it would be funny to leave their gate open, and with everything going on, the tigers were probably spooked and reacted. Seth just got caught in the middle.”