Ivan wasn't quite sure what was going on in his head. There was some unpleasantness to it all, and yet . . . much of what he comprehended as unpleasant wasn't unpleasant in the ways he was used to. Not physically unpleasant in manners he'd experienced, nothing like a stomachache or a headache, a kick to the groin or an overzealous sidecheck. And not something emotionally unpleasant either, like that one time he'd broken up with that girl he'd gone out with for six months and he'd felt sad, or when he'd been angry for missing a game shot. The sort of unpleasantness in his head at present was more . . . stretchy, really . . . but not so much in a physical way as it was mental. Had he been cognizant enough to put words to the experience, Ivan might have thought of it as his brain (maybe not the literal mushy thing but what it represented) being on one of those medieval torture devices, where the wheel turned, and the person's limbs were pulled farther and farther apart, until eventually they popped from their sockets. A continual, strained stretching, though for him there was no end in sight, no eventual dislocation.

He knew it was happening, somehow. The eyes he'd seen through his entire life, the mouth he'd spoken through, the hands with which he'd explored the world and the feet he'd used to traverse it—all these parts of him he no longer controlled, and yet he felt them move, he existed within them as surely as he always had.

Still, he could not say what did rule him, if he did not rule himself.

Something had been at work within him since he'd gone into that theater, was even now spinning webs amongst his inner workings, traveling the threads it strung and connected ever deeper into his core. Through all the uncomfortable stretching his mind suffered, Ivan sensed the thing's movements, but he didn't know what it was, and he had no real understanding of what it was doing. Sometimes his fingertips stung, burned with the echoes of what'd happened the night he'd left his father and brother, followed some siren song he could not ignore into that cavernous black hollow where strange puppetry had danced and sang nightmarishly around him. The actual event remained nebulous in his memory, mostly because whenever he tried to remember specifically what'd occurred, a knife-ish piercing sliced through whatever consciousness kept him from oblivion. So he disallowed himself thoughts of the theater, of whatever had happened there or why he'd even gone inside, and that avoidance seemed to hold back the pain that strove to keep him from recollecting.

The boy interacted with his family; he knew he did. The eyes that saw Oliver and Ramona, his parents and the outer world—they were his own. But he looked through them as if they were windows, as if he were pushed back into his own skull, into the meat of himself, not so much as if he were an entity other than himself but more as if another hand turned the balls of his eyes this way or that, chose when to blink or roll or close, and he was merely a passive participant in the act. The sensation would've unsettled him had he had the faculty to be unsettled.

"What do you think, Ivan?"

They'd been talking to him, and he'd not been keeping up. He'd had a difficult time doing so. Their words always came so quickly! Why couldn't they speak slower? "What was it?" he asked, eyeing his mother across the table, as she'd been the most patient with his tardiness for the past week. He noticed his parents look at one another, thought he caught concern flicker between them.

The family sat around the dinner table, which was uncommon. Since they'd arrived, they'd taken their meals everywhere but at the table, sitting on the deck or in front of the television, at the breakfast bar or even on the beach. They'd eaten irregularly, hardly all together unless they went out, but the grown-ups had insisted on a family sit-down tonight.

"I was thinking of taking you and your brother and sister up to Myrtle Beach for a while."

"How long?"

Lilia pinched her lips in response to her son's snapped question. Tentatively, she repeated, "A week or so, I thought?"

Week? The word took a moment to register in the boy's head. "What about dad?" The scene around Ivan finally solidified through the eyes that were more like windows. His parents, his siblings, they watched him awkwardly, as if this were something they'd settled already, as if everything in the world were settled already, and he was late for some very important meeting.

Something behind his vision pulled, tightened. That stretchiness.

"Your father will stay here. He has to work. I just thought it'd be fun. There's a lot to do in Myrtle Beach, and you've been out of sorts—"

"No."

Oliver lifted his head from the plate of rice pilaf in mild surprise.

"No," Ivan repeated assuredly, taking in a deep breath, tilting his head and tucking into his meal for the first time since sitting down, unsure how long he'd even been at the table. He grinned, suddenly, making eye contact with no one. "I like it here. I don't want to go."

Everyone else at the table watched him, pausing their own consumption. Lilia at length blinked away her awe. "Ivan, you haven't really seemed happy the last several days. I thought—"

"I'm perfectly happy."

"Perfectly happy?" his mother repeated doubtfully. She looked at Oliver, who shrugged and began eating once more. He hadn't a clue what his brother's problem was, but he did know his own stomach was grumbling.

Lilia looked to her husband. "Arthur, would you . . ?"

The man moved his tongue around his mouth a few times, sighed. "Well, Ivan, frankly your mother and I are a little tired of your dragging around the house sleeping all the time. Something's wrong, and if you won't tell us—"

"Oh Jesus Christ, Arthur!" Lilia threw her fork onto her plate with a clatter and stood. "I told you not to make it sound like we're blaming him!" She grabbed her glass of wine and stormed off into the sunroom.

With a sheepish expression, Arthur pushed his chair back from the table and followed his wife.

Ramona's nostrils flared as her parents plummeted into another loud argument. Oliver and Ivan ignored everything and went about eating. Without so much as a word, the child slipped away and went out onto the deck, where she'd left her doll. The sunlight was still hot, even at the late afternoon hour and in spite of the wind that'd rolled in off the water. There'd be rain tonight, Ramona felt. Something in the air told her that. She glanced down the walkway toward the harlequin's tent, the kunstkammer or cabinet of wonders. It'd moved a distance away, farther from the house and out onto the beach proper, but it was still closer to their residence than to any of the other beach houses. Hard to believe that only that morning, she and Oliver had wandered into it, lost themselves for what'd felt like hours, and then found no time had passed at all. The rest of the day she'd watched the line of people move in and out, watched the tent slowly, imperceptibly shift itself, watched those who went in stagger out into the sunlight moments later, blinking and confused as if they'd never again expected to see the outer world.

Her parents weren't wrong about her brother Ivan. Ramona was a precocious child, possessed almost something of a clairvoyant nature, which gave her to understand things like when she should or shouldn't stay in a room, or what someone might be feeling in spite of their words, or when a situation might prove dangerous. She'd known, for example, that a frolic in the harlequin's tent wouldn't prove disastrous, though poor Oliver had been flustered; why, he'd hardly been able to appreciate the curiosities with all his worrying. What a thrill it'd been to explore the wonders within! And had she more secrets she was willing to share, Ramona would gladly take another tour. She knew better than to promise the harlequin anything—promises were best never made. One never knew how circumstances might alter to affect their boundaries.

Out above the sheen of deep blue ocean, an aerial advertising bi-plane, one of those old propeller ones, buzzed past. It'd been periodically gliding back and forth over the water all afternoon, a huge banner behind it advertising Quaxton's Carnival! Coming soon! like a giant metal bumblebee in search of a flower to pollinate. This time the plane was much closer to the shore, though, not a half a mile out over the water as it had been, earlier. Ramona watched it until the thing vanished beyond the houses to her right,most of which protruded farther into the sand than her family's did.

How interesting this place was, she thought, and how entertaining this Quaxton's Circus was going to be! Ramona was sure her friend Elmer and the half n'half and the weird ice-cream-delivering clown were all members of that circus. They'd arrived early, and her brothers had seen the flamethrowers as well. Many of the circus's members had shown up. It was all going to be great fun, Ramona thought, and Bloomy agreed. The doll had been telling her all about it in her disjointed manner for months, now, almost a year come September, and to at last see the vision come to fruition was a delight. The only thing that really bothered Ramona was Ivan's affect. Her brother was surely not all right, but what exactly was wrong was beyond her understanding.

Ramona lifted her doll onto the railing of the deck and focused their attention on the kunstkammer tent. It appeared to have closed shop for the evening (there were no more people in line) but the orange glow of sunlight on its black and white pinwheel of stripes gave off a strange effect, as if fire licked the tent top.

A humming turned to buzzing turned to something more explosive—

Flames . . . smoke!

The bi-plane soared past once more, this time right to left, and it was far closer to shore, the closest it had ever been. From one wing trailed snakes of golden orange and black, and from her position on the deck, Ramona saw some portion of the machine break away and tumble downward into the ocean below. The rest of the vehicle managed to pull upward and carry on somehow, soaring off past the houses, all the way over the dwindling coastline where it vanished.

"Ramona!"

The girl spun at her father's voice.

"Are you all right? What was that?"

She shrugged, saw her brothers and mother follow her father out onto the deck. The denizens of the nearby houses came out of their doors as well. "The plane," Ramona offered in way of explanation, pointing upward at the horizontal twining trails of black smoke before tracing an invisible line downward toward the water.

Arthur took one harried glance upward before straightening and hurrying past his family members and down the walkway. The others followed him at a distance, as did a few other random folk, and even the harlequin peeked its masked face out of the folds of its tent when Arthur passed by, though no one noticed for how quickly it retreated. By the time he made it to the water's edge, a small crowd had come up behind him, but Arthur paid them no heed. He'd caught sight of something large and—yes, he was certain—moving! In the water, splashing.

"Arthur, wait!" Lilia cried sharply, gripping her husband's arm as he began to remove his shirt. "The wind's really picked up! The waves—"

"I've got to, Lil! Someone's out there."

A fleeting emotion crossed the woman's face, but she quickly wiped it away. Taking a step backward, she held up her hands. "Fine. Drown for all I care. I'm just saying we should probably call the police."

With a tight expression, Arthur threw his shirt onto the sand. "You do that, then," he growled before turning and running off into the surf.

It seemed that the instant Arthur sloshed off into the ocean, reached waist-high, dove, and began free-stroking toward the distant flailing object, the waves began to develop peaks, to pyramid into meringue caps. Whereas they'd been choppy before, they grew absolutely formidable within a matter of minutes. Oliver nearly went in after his father, but Lilia stopped him and became so anxious herself that she did end up finding the nearest person with a cell in hand and barking orders for them to call for help. For a terribly tense fifteen or so minutes, the handful of beach vacationers stood and watched in trepidation, Lilia holding back her children and giving up trying to tell others to help her husband (as none of the men present looked younger than seventy). Rain began to fall, gently at first, and then more heavily, and by the time Arthur did thankfully manage to haul his burden out of the water, the waves and wind and rain had conspired to create a truly torrential downpour.

Whatever Arthur held in his arms, it was small enough that he could stumble along with it, even in his exhausted, soaked condition. Someone wrapped a towel around him, though the fabric was so wet that it didn't do much more than weigh down his shoulders, and as he refused to put down his cargo and instead headed up to his house, the neighbors began to disappear in drenched, grumbling clusters.

Lilia called after her husband, but he wouldn't answer, whether because he didn't hear her or just didn't want to respond, she didn't know. So all the children and his wife could do was follow, again, this time up the deck. Rain was absolutely pouring by the time he'd made it to the back door and pushed through it, and he tracked pools of water across the floor as he stepped to the sofa and laid his package on it.

His family gathered around, eager to see what exactly Arthur had risked his life for. The man removed the soaking wet towel from his back and threw it outside onto the deck before returning to the room and sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, where the half-eaten remains of the family dinner were still on full display. He knew what his children and wife stared at, why they were so quiet. He'd seen the child close enough, seen it giggling and snapping at him in the water—not drowning, mind you. Not struggling for breath but instead perched on a small floating device which it immediately popped with one of its pincers the moment Arthur reached it, as if it had been waiting for him, known he'd arrive and what to do when he did, the weird little crustacean boy. Oh, it was a child, a human child. Mostly. But the chest plates of exoskeleton, rosy red, white-edged, pink-tipped, clickers and clackers, prodders and pokers, maxillipeds around its little lipped mouth . . .

Something more and less than human, that's what it was. And he'd almost left it in the water. Had it not been for those very human eyes, those childish pudgy cheeks and drenched curls of hair . . . he might have.

A knock at the door startled all of them, even Ivan.

"I've got it," Arthur groaned. He rose and strode soggily down the hallway.

The door opened to a police officer, paramedics in the background.

"Heard there's a need?"

Arthur scratched the back of his damp auburn head, knowing how he looked, half-naked and soaked, scratches still sprinkled across his torso and arms. Best to be honest. "Well, you see—"

"He went for a swim," Lilia suddenly interpolated, sidling up alongside her husband. "The storm picked up. That's all. We—we thought he was going to drown out there. It was really scary. But we've got him back, now." She bit her lip, pleaded tacitly with Arthur through a black-lashed blink.

"That right?" The officer raised an eyebrow.

Sighing, Arthur nodded. "Yeah. Guess I should've checked the weather, first."

"Well," the paramedic offered, "let's give you a once-over, since we're here already."

The husband and wife looked smugly at one another, something uncertain though not entirely unpleasant hovering between them.