Chapter Eight: What Became of Them
Walter Nash's manuscript, for all its careful decades of work, left one piece of the record deliberately incomplete. He had, by his own admission in its closing pages, spent so long chasing the shape of the thing that took Richmond's dead that he had never fully allowed himself to sit with who, exactly, it had taken, to gather, name by name, precisely what had become of the five people this account has already asked you to grieve once, in its second chapter, and must now ask you to grieve a second time, in a different and in some ways harder way.
Helen Mercer took up that unfinished piece of work herself, in the years following Walter's death, with a care that has made her own contribution to this archive nearly as extensive as his. What follows is drawn from her research, cross-referenced witness accounts from Colby Springs in 1975 and Millhaven in 1992, her own direct observations from that second visit, and, most valuably, a single interview she conducted in 2003 with one of the two people Loretta Voss pulled through a burning canvas wall in 1958, a woman who was, by then, seventy-one years old and had never once, in forty-five years, spoken publicly about what she saw in that tent's final minutes.
That interview belongs at the beginning of this chapter, because it is, in a real sense, where all five of these accounts converge.
Vivian Calloway was twenty-six years old on the night of the fire, newly married, seated near the back of the tent with her husband when the support beam came down. She was, by her own account to Helen, one of perhaps a dozen people close enough to Loretta Voss's torn side exit to owe that woman their lives directly, and she had spent every year since carrying a piece of that night she had never told anyone, not her husband, not her children, not even, for the first several years, entirely herself.
She was saying something the whole time she was pulling at that canvas, Vivian told Helen, in a conversation recorded, at Vivian's own insistence, only in Helen's handwritten notes rather than on tape. Not screaming, exactly, though there was plenty of that too. Underneath it. Almost like a person talking to themselves to keep their hands steady. I got close enough, right at the end, to hear it clearly, and I have never in forty-five years been able to make it make sense, and I don't know that I want you to make it make sense for me, either. I just want it written down somewhere finally, because I'm getting old, and I don't want to be the last person who remembers she said it.
"Remember me right," Vivian said. That's what she kept saying, over and over, tearing at that canvas with her bare hands. "Remember me right. Remember me right." I didn't understand it then. I'm not sure I fully understand it now. But I've thought, more than once over the years, that maybe she already knew, somehow, in that last minute, that whatever was about to happen to her wasn't going to leave much room afterward for anyone to remember her the way she actually was. Maybe that was the last thing she had time to ask for. Just to be remembered right.
Vivian gave Helen one further detail before the interview closed, one she prefaced by saying she had never told a living soul, and had spent forty-five years unsure whether she'd actually seen it or simply built it out of shock and smoke and a mind trying desperately to make sense of something it couldn't.
I looked back. Just once, right as I got through that opening Loretta tore for us. And I saw him, the Ringmaster, out near the center of the ring, where the worst of it was already coming down. He wasn't running. He wasn't even looking for a way out, that I could see. He was just standing there, very still, watching all of it the way you'd watch something from a seat in an audience rather than something happening to you. I've never been able to shake that. Everyone else in that tent, in that last minute, was a person in danger. He looked, God help me, like a man already watching a performance.
Helen closed her notes on that interview with a single line of her own, one that this account has chosen to preserve exactly as she wrote it: I believe Vivian saw the bargain beginning, before he'd even finished making it.
Iris and Ivy Marchetti
Every witness account collected across both confirmed recurrences describes the same eerie precision, two young acrobats moving as a single mind operating two bodies, finishing each other's gestures with a synchronicity that unsettles far more than it should, given how ordinary a skill mirrored performance would be in any other context.
But it is a smaller detail, reported independently by two separate parents at the 1992 Millhaven show, that Helen has come to regard as the truest surviving piece of who Iris and Ivy actually were. Both parents described a moment, unprompted and apparently unnecessary to whatever act the girls were performing, in which the twins broke from their routine to gently, insistently guide a small crying child away from the edge of a game booth's exposed wiring, a hazard neither parent had even noticed themselves until the girls had already steered their child clear of it. Neither witness could explain, afterward, why two performers mid-act would pause for something so small. Helen, reading both accounts side by side for the first time, wrote in the margin of her own notes: They are still doing the thing that got them killed. They are still trying to keep a crowd safe. I don't think that ever stopped being what they know how to do, even now.
Otto Kessler
The strongman booth appears in every witness account with the same unsettling detail: a man built, in one Millhaven witness's memorable phrase, "for a job he already finished," lifting weights no ordinary two men together could budge, standing motionless at his post for stretches long enough to unsettle more than one passerby.
A separate 1992 account, given to Helen directly by a Millhaven father she tracked down two years after the fact, describes a moment that has since become, among the small number of people who keep this archive, one of the most quietly devastating details in the entire record. The father had been standing at the high-striker booth with his own young son on his shoulders when, he said, the strongman's attention, usually fixed on the booth's mallet and bell, indifferent to the crowd around it, turned suddenly and fully toward the two of them, and held there, for what felt like an uncomfortably long moment, with an expression the father struggled for years to describe accurately, before finally settling, in his conversation with Helen, on a single word: grief. Not menace. Not hunger. Simply a vast, wordless grief, directed at a stranger's small child, for reasons the father could not have known and this account can now, having read Otto's story in full, understand all too well.
Loretta Voss
Loretta's role across every documented recurrence remains consistent with what this account has already described, readings that land with an accuracy that leaves more than one visitor shaken, warnings delivered obliquely because, it seems, no fuller truth is permitted to pass through whatever now speaks for her. Helen's own encounter with her in 1992, recorded in the previous chapter, remains the clearest firsthand account on record of what those warnings actually sound like from the inside of that tent.
What Vivian Calloway's account adds, forty-five years later, is an origin for that riddling, half-broken speech: a dying woman's last coherent request, twisted by whatever now holds her into the only form of speech it will still allow. Remember me right has become, across every account Helen has gathered, something closer to let me try to warn you, in whatever fragments I'm permitted, the same plea, worn down by decades into the only shape the Understage lets it keep.
Charlie Pemberton
Charlie remains, across every account, the performer who says the least and is, in some ways, the hardest to write about plainly, the youngest victim, preserved, it seems, in the specific shape of a boy who never got to finish becoming anything else.
Helen's research turned up one detail from Millhaven that she has never been able to fully explain, and has chosen, after some deliberation, to include anyway. A mother who purchased a balloon from him for her seven-year-old daughter found, several hours later, a small scrap of paper tucked into the balloon's ribbon, unsigned, in handwriting a county forensic document examiner Helen consulted years later described as consistent with a teenage hand, reading only a single word.
Run.
The mother, by her own account, had already left the fairground before the closing show began, and never connected the note to anything beyond an odd bit of litter until Helen's later inquiry prompted her to think back on it more carefully. Helen has never been able to determine whether the note reached her before or after the family's decision to leave, but she has written, in her own notes, that she believes it was the former, and that whatever remains of Charlie Pemberton beneath his silence is still, in whatever small and furtive ways the Understage permits him, trying to warn people the only way he has left.
Franklin "Pop" Pope
Pop's stall remains, in every account, a place of unsettling contradiction, a warm, grandfatherly presence serving something that is unmistakably no longer food, described by more than one witness in language too disturbing for this account to reproduce in full, and which this record will not dwell on further than necessary.
But a single detail, again from Millhaven, again reported independently by two witnesses who had no reason to compare notes, deserves to be the last word on who Pop still is, underneath whatever he has become. Both witnesses described a small, frightened child, separated briefly from her family near the food stalls, approaching Pop's booth in tears, and Pop, rather than serving her anything at all, coming around from behind his counter, crouching to her level, and pressing into her hand what both witnesses independently and specifically described as an ordinary butterscotch candy, wrapped in ordinary cellophane, before gently walking her the short distance back to her waiting mother.
It is, of everything in this chapter, the detail Helen has returned to most often in her own private notes, and the one she has said, on more than one occasion, convinced her more fully than anything else in the entire archive that whatever Grinwick's bargain actually cost these five people, it did not manage to take all of them.
He was the safest adult on that whole fairground once, she wrote, beneath both accounts, in the same careful hand Walter had trained her to keep. I don't think that part of him ever fully stopped being true. I think it might be the one part of any of them the Understage has never quite managed to finish erasing.