Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Carnival Of Souls

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2024-12-18 0 0 946.22KB 184 页 5.9玖币

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This is wrong, she thought.

“Shh,”Caligarius whispered.“It’s all right.”

The silvery notes enfolded her, soothed her, eased her back into the good place she had found.

Where she was special.

“Yes.”

“Wait,” she said, fighting against it, fighting…why was she fighting?

Because I am a fighter. That’s what I am.

Because something here was not right.

Buffy blinked at the silver door.

But it wasn’t a door. She was standing in the mirror maze, staring at herself in one of the panels. Alone.

Her reflection stared back at her.

“Mom?” she called.

The calliope music played.

“A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go…

“Come to me. Be with me. Your pride will be your greatest pleasure. And you should be proud. You

are one of a kind. The only one in all your generation.”

“Come to you,” Buffy said, reaching out a hand toward the mirror.

Something reached back.

And grabbed hold.

Hard.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer™

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Carnival of Souls

Available from SIMON & SCHUSTER

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used

fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination,

and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT and related logo are trademarks of Simon & Schuster,

Inc.

Library of Congress Control Number 2005933337

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ISBN: 1-4169-3431-6

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

In memory of Belle’s beloved grandfather,

George Wayne Holder.

We miss you, Papa Wayne.

Acknowledgments

As always, my thanks first and foremost to Joss Whedon; and to Sarah Michelle Gellar, David

Boreanaz, David Greenwalt, Tim Minear, Marti Noxon, David Fury, and the many other producers,

actors, and staffs of bothAngel andBuffy . My deepest gratitude to my agent and dear friend, Howard

Morhaim, and to his assistant, Allison Keiley. Thank you to Patrick Price, who has been such a

wonderful editor and a writer’s true friend in the publishing loop; and to Debbie Olshan at Fox, whose

insights have kept me out of more trouble. Thanks to theBuffy andAngel fan clubs, Abbie Bernstein, Tara

DeLullo, Kristy Bratton; Titan/Dreamwatch; Inkworks; cityofangel.com; litvamp, saveangel.com,

IAMTW, novelscribes, SF-FFWs, Persephone, and Buffy Studies gurus David Lavery and Rhonda

Wilcox; Ashley McConnell, Monica Elrod, Terri Grazer Yates, Linda Wilcox, Karen Hackett, Barbara

Nierman, Elisa Jimenez-Steiger, Ellen Greenfield, Wayne Holder, Amy Shricker, Jennifer and Janice

Kayler; and Christie and Richard Holt; to Steve Perry; Del and Sue Howison, Lydia Marano and Art

Cover, the YaYa’s—Lucy Walker, Anny Caya, Leslie Ackel Jones, Elise Jones, Kerri Ingle, and Belle

Holder; to Sandra Morehouse and Richard Wilkinson; to Bob Vardeman, and Jeff Mariotte and

Maryelizabeth Hart. Thanks to Andy Thompson at Family Karate for teaching us to live the black belt

way. Lisa Clancy, you are my Termie. Belle Holder, you’re my daughter, and I love you. Courtesy,

integrity, perseverance, self-control, indominitable spirit.

Prologue

It was Tuesday.

After nightfall.

In Sunnydale.

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And Buffy Summers the Vampire Slayer was out on patrol instead of at the Bronze with Willow and

Xander (and hopefully Angel) because Giles had figured out that tonight was the Rising.

The Rising of what, Buffy’s watcher did not know, but it was easy to guess that it probably meant

vampires. Maybe zombies. Something that rose from graves, anyway.

Something that kept her from the fun other sixteen-year-olds were having.

Sighing, Buffy trailed her fingers over the lowered head of a weeping cherub statue and waved her

flashlight in an arc.

“Here, rising guys,” she called plaintively. “Ready to play when you are.”

She had on her black knitted cap and Angel’s black leather jacket, but she was still a little chilly. Maybe

it was just because she was walking through Blessed Memories, the graveyard that contained the du Lac

tomb, famed in the annals of Buffy’s diary as the graveyard out of which Spike and Dru had stolen a

fancy decoding cross called, amazingly enough, the du Lac Cross. They had used it to nearly kill Angel.

Since then, it was not her favorite cemetery ever.

Blessed Memories also contained a pet cemetery, a little square of plots with miniature headstones that

tugged at Buffy’s heart.TOBY MY PUP RIP 1898.R KITTIE LUCY 1931. She had no time for pets,

not even zombie cats freshly risen from the grave. She had hardly any time for anything, what with the

slayage and the studying, okay, not the studying; but still and all, it was Sunnydale that was the problem,

with all its death and monsters and standard normal-teenage-girl pressures, like having friends and not

getting kicked out of school….

If my best buds and I could be anywhere but here, that would be…She thought for a moment. She and

Willow were really good at that game. Anywhere But Here was created for high school kids, especially

those who had to live in Sunnydale.

…in Maui, with Angel…. Okay, not. Too much sun for a boyfriend who would burst into flames if he

stepped into the tropical rays. So…

…in Paris, with Angel…and Willow could be with James Spader—I officially give him to her because

I’m with Angel now—and we’re so not eating snails, but oh, I know! French pastries. And we are

shopping…

…for rings…

Buffy stopped and cocked her head. Did she just hear something? Snap of a twig, maybe? A cough?

She listened eagerly for a replay so she could head toward it. She waited. Waited yet more. Heard

nothing. Turned off her flashlight. More waiting.

Behold the sounds of silence.

She tried to pick up the Paris thread again. French pastries, okay, maybe too early in the relationship to

shop for rings, then for shoes…. Truth was, she reallywould be happy to be just about anywhere but

here. If only she could just run away, join in the fun-having of other kids her age. Join the circus, even.

Except she didn’t like circuses. Never had. What was with those clowns, anyway? She shivered. She

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was with Xander on that one: They gave her a wiggins.

Send in the clowns.

Six miles away, just past the outbuildings of Crest College, the trees shivered. The clouds fled and the

moon trailed after them, desperate to hide.

Sunnydale, loaded with souls ripe for the plucking…

Five miles away.

The clowns materialized first, big feet flapping, overstuffed bottoms wiggling, in polka dots and rainbow

stripes, and white gloves hiding fingers that no one should ever see.

A jag of lightning:

A parade of trucks, wagons, lorries. A maroon wagon, its panels festooned with golden Harlequins and

bird women plucking lyres, shimmered and stayed solid. Behind it, a Gypsy cart with a Conestoga-style

bonnet jangled with painted cowbells, and beneath the overhanging roof, black-and-silver ribbons

swayed. Behind the wagon, a forties-era freight truck blew diesel exhaust into the velvet layers of

moonlight. A jagged line, creaking back into shadows, disappearing. Maybe the entire apparition was

just a dream.

Thunder rolled, and they reappeared.

Maybe they were just a nightmare.

Spectral horses whinnied and chuffed; it began to rain, and through the murky veil of downpour and fog,

the horses’ heads were skulls; their heads were…heads. They breathed fire; they didn’t breathe at all.

They began to rot in slow motion.

The clowns ran up and down the advancing line, applauding and laughing at the flicker-show, the black

magic lantern extravaganza.

Skeletons and corpses hunkered inside truck and wagon cabs and buckboard seats. Whipcracks

sparked. Eyes lolled. Mouths hung open, snapped shut. Teeth fell out. Eyes bobbed from optic nerves.

Things…reassembled.

A creak, and then nothing.

Two ebony steeds pulled the last vehicle—the thirteenth wagon in the cortege. It was an old Victorian

traveling-medicine-show wagon, maybe something that had crisscrossed the prairies and the badlands,

promising remedies for rheumatism and the gout when the only ingredients in the jug were castor oil, a

dead rattlesnake, and wood alcohol.

Where their hooves touched, the earth smoked. Black feathers bobbing in their harnesses, black feathers

waving from the four corners of the ornate, ebony wagon, the horses were skeletons were horse flesh

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were demon stallions ridden by misshapen, leathery creatures with sagging shoulder blades, flared ears,

and pencil-stub fingers. And as the moon shied away from the grotesquerie, the angle of light revealed

words emblazoned on each of the thirteen vehicles that snuck toward Sunnydale, home to hundreds of

thousands of souls determined to ignore the peril they were in:

PROFESSOR CALIGARI’S TRAVELING CARNIVAL

The wind howled through the trees—or was it the ghostly dirge of a calliope?

Too soon to tell.

Too late to do anything about it.

Chapter One

What the heck is that?Buffy wondered as she stepped from beneath the shelter of a tomb in Shady Rest,

cemetery number eight on her hit parade of twelve. The repeated hollow sounds, which maybe were

musical notes, had coincided with the stopping of the rain. They were even stranger than the Hindi

songfest she had watched with Willow and Xander, the one about the podiatrist and the water buffalo.

She listened hard. Was it a distant boom box? Did it have anything—please—to do with the Rising? It

would be so nice if something actually happened before she packed it in, aside from ripping her black

leather pants on the chain-link fence she’d hopped to get in there. Plus dropping her big black flashlight,

which now no longer worked.

There it was again, kind of a sinister tootling or something…. She was already trying to figure out how to

describe it to Giles. It was nothing she had ever heard before.

A terrified shriek pierced the darkness.

Ah! Butthat was!

The Slayer brightened. No, no, not brightened—because that would be wrong—so much as erupted

into action, racing toward the plea for help. She put on the turbo as the shriek was joined by a cry, this

one lower in pitch. A guy and a girl, then.

Without her flashlight, Buffy scrutinized the passing shadows: grave, grave, crypt, tree draped with moss,

grave, stone vase of dead flowers, darkness. Naturally whatever was going down, would go down in

darkness. It was the way of evil.

From the sleeve of Angel’s leather jacket, she pulled out a stake. Well-whittled death, that was the way

of the Slayer.

She ran into the black gloom, her gorgeous and, unfortunately, suede boots crunching wet leaves and

twigs, and a plastic drink cup—wishing now for Angel’s help, because he could see in the dark—and

then she stepped on, or rather in, something slippery and gross—okay, maybe it was okay that he wasn’t

here to witness that.

“Oh my God! Help!” screamed a girl. She was maybe twenty yards to Buffy’s left…and she was being

pursued by something big—make that a lot of something bigs, judging by the rhythmic thudding of many

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摘要：

Thisiswrong,shethought.“Shh,”Caligariuswhispered.“It’sallright.”Thesilverynotesenfoldedher,soothedher,easedherbackintothegoodplaceshehadfound.Whereshewasspecial.“Yes.”“Wait,”shesaid,fightingagainstit,fighting…whywasshefighting?BecauseIamafighter.That’swhatIam.Becausesomethingherewasnotright.Buffybli...

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