Charles continues. “We can’t be good unless we know what bad is, and it’s a shame we’re working against time,” he says.
Jim asks Charles where the carnival came from. Charles tells him it probably started as one man, long ago, and he slowly collected all the others. “The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread,” he says. “They butter it with pain.” They exist only to hurt people, and that hurt “fuels” the carnival. The boys ask the older man how he knows all this. “My skeleton
knows,” Charles says. “
It tells me.
I tell you.”