How to Curse in Hieroglyphics Read Free Page B

quiver … then shudder … Before the girls knew it, the boxes were rattling crazily, the red flag arms waving wildly. The truck bed beneath Cheryl and Tweed felt as if it was trying to buck them off into space, and the air filled with the sounds of strange, tinny music …
    And then the caravan came over the rise.
    The rumble was deafening, the dust cloud choking, as a parade of vehicles went thundering past on the left, ignoring the stop sign, and leaving the two girls covering their faces in the storm of road grit it kicked up. In the lead was an old army truck draped with brightly decorated canvas banners and festooned with battered loudspeakers blaring distorted merry-go-round tunes. There were crudely painted images of all sorts of oddities and strange creatures—reptiles and zebras and somethingthat looked like a two-headed duck, pictures of girls in feathered headdresses and men in top hats and tails. And above it all, a big, colourful banner proclaiming:

    Three long flatbed trucks followed close behind the lead truck. On the first, there was an enormous cannon, painted in shades of Day-Glo orange and yellow and red, with bursts of flame at its base and the words “THE AMAZIN’ HUMAN CANNONBALL!!” painted on its side. The second and third flatbeds were loaded with precariously tied-down carnival rides—a Ferris wheel, a Super-Swinger and a Zipper, the Polar Express, a carousel—their disassembled parts resembling the exoskeletons of giant insects from an old stop-motion creature feature.

    Following behind the ride transports came a couple of trucks with wooden-slat compartments that wafted livestock-stinky winds and bits of hay in their wake. There was another flatbed packed with wood-and-canvas stalls for carnival games—Whack-A-Mole and Shooting Gallery and Go Fish—and food concessions, and still another was loaded with heaps of heavy, striped canvas, probably for the carnival’s tents.
    Next came two extra-large panel trucks, with the words “MYSTERIES,” “ARCANE” and “EXOTIC” painted on the sides, along with images of shrunken heads and petrified dinosaur remains and mystical objects like crystal balls and voodoo dolls. All waiting to be discovered in the carnival’s Main Attraction, as presented by Colonel Winchester P. Q. Dudley, himself! Whoever that was …
    â€œWhat in the heck …?” Tweed’s jaw fell open, which caused her to start coughing instantly when she sucked in a cloud of road dust.
    Cheryl was just speechless. For a moment. Then …
    â€œâ€˜World-O-Wonders’?” she exclaimed, outraged. “Who does this Dudley dude think he is, stealing our W-O-W slogan! That’s the kind of thing that causes brand confusion!”
    She leaped to her feet in the truck bed, sputtering and fuming over the (vague) similarity in catch-phrases. Tweed wisely let her cousin rant, not bothering to point out that there was probably no reasonable waythe carnival could have had foreknowledge of the girls’ business ventures, let alone their typo-slogan. The whole carnival thing made her instantly uneasy, too—although for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Tweed was, after all, fond of things macabre and strange and spooky, in the spirit of the gothly tradition to which she aspired. But there was just something about the pictures on the truck that made her pale skin crawl.
    Especially the centre panel of the display on the last truck. It showed a garish sarcophagus, the lid of which looked to be slowly creaking open, nudged by a bandage-wrapped hand. The title under the picture read:

    â€œWhat the heck is a Za-ha … Fa-za … whatever that says?” Cheryl asked, pausing in her rant to glare at the unfamiliar words as the trucks rolled past.
    The last vehicle in the whole crazy train was a somewhat worse-for-wear old touring sedan with the top down. In the back seat sat a