Monstrous Affections (31 page)

“Hello,” said James.

“Good sir,” said the man, tipping his hat. “Clayton O’Connor, at
your service.” The woman smiled wanly. “And this is Clarissa.”

James stood there awkwardly for a moment. They didn’t appear
to recognize him — which as he thought of it wasn’t unusual: circus
folk had a show of their own to perform Saturday afternoons.
There’d be precious little time for the pictures, what with all the
fire-eating and clowning and lion-taming to fill up the day.

“Good afternoon,” James said. “James Thorne. I’m looking — that
is — ”

“The eye,” said Clarissa, nodding. She got a funny look in her
eye.

“Do not mind her and her riddles, friend,” said Clayton O’Connor.
“She’s new at the Sight.”

James smiled. “
The Sight
. She’s a fortune teller?”

Clayton nodded, and removed his bowler cap to reveal a balding
crown covered in intricate tattoos. “An oracle,” he said.

“Ah. Of course. Oracles speak in riddles, don’t they?”

Clayton shrugged, held his hat in front of him. “It is a mixed
blessing, good sir.” He extended the hat a little further, like a
bowl. “Prophecy is good, but it’s nothing,” he said, “without sound
interpretation.”

“I see.” James laughed. “Prophecies are free, but interpretation
costs a penny.”

“Five pennies.”

James’s first impulse was to walk away — leave the tattooed
man and his abstruse young oracle to prey on the next townie that
happened by. But he dug into his pocket, and came up with a nickel
he thought he might spare. The oracle was a good shtick, and these
people had just survived a train wreck; he couldn’t begrudge them
their little grift. He tossed the coin into the hat. “Interpret away,” he
said, and knelt down beside them. “Tell me . . .” He paused, looked
across the creek to the dark evergreen wood. Some of the circus
folk between himself and the river were taking note of him — of his
new automobile. A dwarf limped up to it and gave the rear tires a
malicious little kick. “. . . tell me about the Cyclops.”

Clayton looked into his cap — with his damaged fingers, he pulled
the nickel out, turned it over and examined both sides.

Clayton paused a moment, then looked James in the eye. “You’ve
seen it, have you, sir?”

“The Cyclops? I have.” James took a breath. “Yes.”

He shook his head. “And you’re here anyway.”

“I have to find him. It.”

“Father,” said the oracle, throwing her head back theatrically and
gasping at the sky. “Here for his father.”

“Hmm.” James wasn’t sure how good Clarissa was at oracling.
But as an actress — well, she made wooden little Alice Shaw look
positively Shakespearean.

“That has nothing to do with this. My father’s dead.”

James looked at Clayton, then at Clarissa. Her eyes fluttered
shyly to her hands, a sly smile playing across her lips. Clayton raised
his eyebrows in a questioning way.

Clayton nodded. “A lot of men are dead by that monstrosity’s
hand,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“That’s why
you’re
here,” said Clarissa, looking across the creek
but pointing straight at James.

James ignored her. “All right, Clayton,” he said. “Tell me about
this thing.”

Clayton looked at him levelly. “That’s more than interpretation,”
he said, rubbing two coinless fingers together as he spoke. “That’s
a tale.”

Sighing, James dug into his pocket for a couple more pennies.
When he’d added them to the nickel, Clarissa feigned a swoon across
the log where she sat, and Clayton started talking.

“The Cyclops,” said Clayton, “was with us for less than a season.
Sam Twillicker found the beast in a deep cellar at a ranch in eastern
Texas, where he’d been guesting over the Christmas break. Baines
and Twillicker had had a bad run of luck with the Hall of Nature’s
Abominations the past season. The mermaid had come unstitched and
spewed straw and cotton all over her case in the middle of our St. Louis
show in May. In the early morning hours of July 8, our prized geek
Skinny Larouche ran off into a Kansas cornfield with a pair of chickens
and the previous day’s nut. Later that month, Alfie Fowler took ill
with something in his intestine. In August, the bug moved to the gut
of brother Mitch, and by Labour Day we’d lost our genuine Siamese
twins. Perhaps, said Charlie Baine, the days of sideshows were winding
down and they ought just fold up the rest of Nature’s Abominations
and concentrate on the Rings. But Twillicker didn’t buy that; to him, a
freak tent was as much a part of the show as clowns and lion-tamers
and the high wire. So when his host in Texas mentioned the thing
he was keeping in the cellar, and intimated that he had intended the
thing’s stay should be temporary — ‘I’ll have to kill it or be rid of it, and
I’m not sure I can kill it,’ he said — Sam Twillicker was intrigued.

“Of course, intrigued’s not the same as fooled. Twillicker took
care not to let his interest show.

“‘We have an excellent strong man,’ he said cagily. ‘You’ve got
a fat Greek with an eye out? I might put a patch on my Wotun the
Magnificent, change his name to Polyphemus and call him the one-eyed giant — and not have spent a penny more.’

“‘It would not be the same,’ said the host. ‘For mine — he has seen
the Trojan women and sung duets with Sirens and walked the sea
bottom at the heel of Poseidon. How can you compare?’”

“‘You ought have been a barker, my friend,’ said Twillicker. ‘For
you could make the rubes see all those things and more in even my
poor Wotun, with pretty words like that.’

“‘Not the same as seeing it for real, though.’

“Late in the evening, Twillicker walked outside the ranch house,
to do just that: see it with his own eyes. They climbed down a tunnel
past a padlocked door in the Texas scrub, and stepped out onto a
ledge in a room like the bottom of a giant well. The thing — the
Cyclops — was below them, lolling against the wall amid a carpet of
whitened bones. Flies buzzed and flitted in the lantern beam that
Twillicker’s host shone down, and the creature looked up into it with
its single great eye, so wide that Twillicker could see the pair of them
reflected in it.

“‘How big is he?’ said Twillicker.

“‘Twenty and five,’ said his host. ‘From toe to skull top, twenty
and five feet.’

“‘And that eye,’ said Twillicker. ‘Sitting unnaturally in the middle
of the forehead like that. It’s real?’

“‘It better be,’ said the host, ‘for the beast has none but that one
to see by.’

“‘My God,’ said Twillicker.

“The bones rattled and crunched below as the Cyclops stirred.
Both men stopped their conversation, as the thing drew himself
to his feet. Standing, the Cyclops was nearly eye level to him. His
breath came at him like a hot Mediterranean wind. His eye blinked.
A hand, big as a door, came up over the lip of the ledge — Twillicker
barely had the wit to step back into the tunnel before it could grasp
him. The Cyclops opened his great mouth, and rumbled something
that sounded like Greek. Hot, unbreathable air followed them up
the tunnel as they backed away from the grabbing hand.

“‘That,’ sputtered Twillicker, as they climbed the stairs to the
Texas night, ‘that thing was going to eat me!’

“‘Not likely,’ said his host. ‘The Cyclops likes lamb better than
man. But still — better he didn’t get hold of either of us. Because that
eye — that eye of his is a hungry eye.’

“‘What do you mean by that?’

“‘What I say. It’s a big eye — a God’s eye — and it hungers for the sight
of a man’s soul. It’ll drink that sight right out of you, if you let it.’

“Twillicker spent another three days at the ranch — thinking
mostly about what that meant. He didn’t know about getting his
soul drunk up — but he surely wanted to see that Cyclops again. He
wanted to see him something fierce; it took all his will not to steal
down that hole again, and look at the beast once more. How many
times, he wondered, could he haul a rube back and back again to
see this beast, if it had such a draw on a seasoned ringmaster as
Twillicker?

“He came back a month later with the right cash and equipment
for moving the creature. By March, he had a rail car rigged up and
fresh signs made. By the middle of April, the circus was on the move
again, and Nature’s Abominations was back in business.

“There were practical problems. For one thing, the Cyclops was
not a professional. It was more like keeping an animal than an
employee — as they discovered when our roustabouts tried to use
the Cyclops’s strength to haul up the big top outside Denver and
three of them wound up in bandages and splints, raving for days
from their trials at the Cyclops’s hands. The creature’s unruliness
kept him out of the Big Top as well. He couldn’t be trusted around
townies without thick bars between he and them, because unlike
our old geek Larouche, depravity was no act for the Cyclops. He
leered — at everyone, in a measure, but he paid particular attention
to the aerialists. One time — ” here Clayton paused, and patted
Clarissa on the shoulder “ — one time he got hold of this girl here.
Didn’t he darling?”

Clarissa’s eyes rolled into her head and she trembled for an
instant. Then she blinked and nodded.

“Took five of us to get her back,” he said. “Clarissa tore a ligament,
and that was it for her on the trapeze. Looked at her for a little
long — maybe drunk a bit much of her poor wee soul, hey, girl? And
she hasn’t been the same since.

“But for that, no one could deny that with the addition of the
Cyclops to our roster, the Twillicker and Baine Circus had turned
a corner. Every town we stopped opened its purse to us and our
monster. Rubes loved Hall of Nature’s Abominations now that the
Cyclops sat in its middle. They forgave the two-headed ewe that
floated nearly invisible in a milky brine. They didn’t mind that the
geek cage was still empty, or that the two Italians who played the
Siamese twins didn’t even look like relations. They hurried past
Gerta the Doll Woman and Lois the Chicken Lady. Didn’t heed the
resentful glare that our own Wotun the Magnificent gave them, as
they sat through his Nine Feats of Strength that raised sweat-beads
big as dimes on shoulders and a brow that had one time seemed
immense. They each paid their nickels, and gathered in five-dollar
crowds in the Hall’s middle for the headline of our show — and
listened, as Twillicker himself rolled the spiel outside the curtained-off cage of Polyphemus, Son of Poseidon.

“‘He has seen the Trojan women and sung duets with Sirens and
walked the sea bottom at the heel of Poseidon,’ Twillicker would
bellow. ‘He has fought Ulysses, battled Odysseus, and shook a fist at
great Jove himself! Ladies and gentlemen — I give you — ’

“And their breath would suck in, as the bright red curtains drew
from the front of a tall, steel-barred cage.

“‘
— I give you Polyphemus! Son of the Sea God Poseidon!
’

“And the curtain would open, and the men would gasp, and the
children scream — and the women, some of them, would faint dead
away at the sight of the naked giant Polyphemus. His lips would pull
back from a shark’s-row of teeth, and his great arms would rise to
rattle the bars of his bolted-together cage — and he’d take a taste of
them with that eye of his.

“And then, as fast as it’d risen, the red curtain would fall back
in place, and the next crowd would come through. By the time the
circus was ready to pull up, all the crowds were filled with familiar
faces. They all felt the same draw Twillicker had felt that first
night. By the time the circus left a town, the coffers were filled to
overflowing with fresh torrents of silver.

“The Cyclops became a part of the circus like he’d always been
there. The cat wranglers and elephant handlers and the roustabouts
had all worked out a drill for moving him, from his cage to the
railcar and back again — figured out how to feed him without getting
too close to those giant hands, those lethal jaws — and devised
a way to wrap the ropes and chains around his wrists and ankles
and middle, so he couldn’t squirm much. Charlie Baine looked at
his books, and understood that for all the food he was buying for
his Cyclops, profits were still higher than they’d ever been. As for
the freaks, now relegated to second-class oddities in the shadow of
Polyphemus? They rattled the change in their pockets and shrugged.
Even Wotun couldn’t complain much, about being upstaged by the
Greek giant. It was as good as pitching the tent next to the Grand
Canyon. Folks’d pay to watch your show, just because it was on their
way to the view.

“And the view,” said Clayton, “doesn’t ask for a cut of the nut.”

“But the Cyclops wasn’t just a view,” said James. “The Cyclops felt
differently.”

Clayton winked at him. “No fooling you, sir. ’Tis true. The
Cyclops felt
differently
. And why wouldn’t he? For we kept him
like an animal, although he was a thinking beast. He stood in his
cage, listening to Twillicker holler his spiel, enduring the stares of
the glassy-eyed rubes. Submitted to the will of his wranglers. And
always he watched. With that great eye he has. He watched and he
paid attention. Listened to what Twillicker said, and made out the
words. Listened to the rubes muttering amongst themselves. Heard
the wranglers and the freaks and the clowns chatter on. Two weeks
and a day before the tragedy here — ” he gestured behind him to the
camp “ — he spoke.”

Clarissa the Oracle stood, her eyelids trembling in a sideshow
trance. “
I am Polyphemus
,” she said in a deepened voice. “
Son of the
Sea God Poseidon
.”

“Dear Clarissa started talking then, too. She’d given up the
trapeze, and been fooling with tea leaves and Tarot cards instead.
We thought she might open a fortune-telling booth. When the
words started to come — the poetry — it dawned on us all that little
Clarissa should start calling herself the Oracle.”