Then they came to the others.
By definition freaks were supposed to be strange, but these went beyond strange into the positively alien. The Alligator Boy, the Bird Man with flapping feathered wings… these "freaks" were so alien they couldn't be real.
Like the Snake Man. Jack couldn't see where the real him ended and the fake began.
Makeup and prosthetics, Jack told himself.
But the way he used his tail to wrap around a stuffed rabbit and squeeze it… just like a boa constrictor.
A good fake, but still a fake. Had to be… even if this was Monroe.
One aspect of the show that reinforced his feeling that these weren't real was that there was nothing sad or pathetic about these "freaks." No matter how bizarre their bodies, they seemed proud—almost belligerently so—of their deformities, as if the people strolling the midway were the freaks.
Jack slowed before a booth with a midget standing on a miniature throne. He had a tiny handlebar mustache and slicked-down black hair parted in the middle. A gold-lettered sign hung above him: little sir echo.
"Hi!" a little girl said.
"Hi, yourself," the little man replied in a note-perfect imitation of the child's voice.
"Hey, Mom!" she cried. "He sounds just like me!"
"Hey, Mom!" Little Sir Echo said. "Come on over and listen to this guy!"
Jack noticed a tension in the mother's smile and thought he knew why. The mimicked voice was too much like her child's—pitch and timbre, all perfect down to the subtlest nuance. If Jack had been facing away, he wouldn't have had the slightest doubt that the little girl had spoken. Amazing, but creepy too.
"You're very good," Mom said.
"I'm not very good," he replied in a perfect imitation of the woman's voice. "I'm the best. And your voice is as beautiful as you are."
Mom flushed. "Why, thank you."
The midget turned to Jack, still speaking in the woman's voice: "And you, sir—Mr. Strong Silent Type. Care to say anything?"
"Yoo doorty rat!" Jack said in his best imitation of a bad comic imitating James Cagney. "Yoo killed my brutha!"
The woman burst out laughing. She didn't say so, but she had to think it was awful… because it was.
"A W. C. Fields fan!" the little man cried with a mischievous wink. "I have an old recording of one of his stage acts! Want to hear?"
Without waiting for a reply, Sir Echo began to mimic the record, and a chill ran through Jack as he realized that the little man was faithfully reproducing not only the voice but the pops and cracks of the scratched vinyl as well.
"Marvelous, my good man!" Jack said in a W. C. Fields imitation as bad as his Cagney. "Marvelous."
He moved off, wondering why he'd been afraid to let the midget hear his natural voice. Some prerational corner of his brain had shied away from it. Probably the same part that made jungle tribefolk shun a camera for fear it would steal their souls.
As he passed a booth with a green-skinned fellow billed as "The Man from Mars," he glanced up and stopped cold.
Dead ahead, a banner hung over the midway. Faded yellow letters spelled out sharkman. But it was the crude drawing that had captured his attention.
Damn if it didn't resemble a rakosh.
After what he'd seen here already, he wouldn't be half surprised if it were.
Not that one of Kusum's rakoshi had a single chance in hell of being alive. They'd all died last summer between Governors Island and the Battery. He'd seen to that. Crisped them all in the hold of the ship that housed them. One of them did make it to shore, the one he'd dubbed Scar-lip, but it had swum back out into the burning water and had never returned.
The rakoshi were dead, all of them. The species was extinct.
But something here might resemble a rakosh, and if so, he was extra glad he hadn't brought Vicky along. Kusum Bahkti, the madman who'd controlled a nest of them, had vowed to wipe out the Westphalen bloodline; Vicky, as the last surviving Westphalen, had been his final target. His rakoshi emissaries had been relentless in their pursuit.
Passing a stall containing a woman with a third eye in the center of her forehead that supposedly "Sees ALL!" Jack came to an old circus cart with iron bars on its open side, one of the old cages-on-wheels once used to transport and display lions and tigers and such. The sign above it read: the amazing sharkman! Jack noticed people leaning across the rope border; they'd peer into the cage, then back off with uneasy shrugs.
This deserved a look.
Jack pushed to the front and squinted into the dimly lit cage. Something there, slumped in the left rear corner, head down, chin on chest, immobile. Something huge, a seven-footer at least. Dark-skinned, manlike, and yet… undeniably alien.
Jack felt the skin along the back of his neck tighten as ripples of warning shot down his spine. He knew that shape. But that was all it was. A shape. So immobile. It had to be a dummy of some sort or a guy in a costume. A helluva good costume.
But it couldn't be the real thing. Couldn't be…
Jack ducked under the rope and took a few tentative steps closer to the cage, sniffing the air. One of the things he remembered about the rakoshi was their reek, like rotting meat. He caught a trace of it here, but that could have been from spilled garbage. Nothing like the breath-clogging stench he remembered.
He moved close enough to touch the bars but didn't. The thing was a damn good dummy. He could almost swear it was breathing.
Jack whistled and said, "Hey, you in there!"
The thing didn't budge, so he rapped on one of the iron bars.
"Hey—!"
Suddenly it moved, the eyes snapping open as the head came up, deep yellow eyes that seemed to glow in the shadows.
Imagine the offspring from mating a giant hairless gorilla with a mako shark. Cobalt skin, hugely muscled, no neck worth mentioning, no external ears, narrow slits for a nose.
Spikelike talons, curved for tearing, emerged from the tips of the three huge fingers on each hand as the yellow eyes fixed on Jack. The lower half of its huge sharklike head seemed to split as the jaw opened to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth. It uncoiled its legs and slithered across the metal flooring toward the front of the cage.
Along with instinctive revulsion, memories surged back: the cargo hold full of their dark shapes and glowing eyes, the unearthly chant, the disappearances, the deaths…
Jack backed up a step. Two. Behind him he heard the crowd oooh! and aaah! as it pressed forward for a better look. He took still another step back until he could feel their excited breath on his neck. These people didn't know what one of these things could do, didn't know their power, their near-indestructibility. Otherwise they'd be running the other way.
Jack felt his heart kick up its already rising tempo when he noticed how the creature's lower lip was distorted by a wide scar. He knew this particular rakosh. Scar-lip. The one that had kidnapped Vicky, the one that had escaped the ship and almost got to Vicky on the shore. The one that had damn near killed Jack.
He ran a hand across his chest. Even through the fabric of his shirt he could feel the three long ridges that ran across his chest, souvenir scars from the creature's talons.
His mouth felt like straw. Scar-lip… alive.
But how? How had it survived the blaze on the water? How had it wound up on Long Island in a traveling freak show?
"Ooh, look at it, Fred!" said a woman behind Jack.
"Just a guy in a rubber suit," replied a supremely confident male voice.
"But those claws—did you see the way they came out?"
"Simple hydraulics. Nothing to it."
You go on believing that, Fred, Jack thought as he watched the creature where it crouched on its knees, its talons encircling the iron bars, its yellow eyes burning into Jack.
You know me too, don't you.
It appeared to be trying to stand but its legs wouldn't support it. Was it chained, or possibly maimed?
The ticket seller came by then, sans boater, revealing a shaven head. Up close like this Jack was struck by his cold eyes. He was carrying a blunt elephant gaff that he rapped against the bars.
"So you're up, aye?" he said to the rakosh in a harsh voice. "Maybe you've finally learned your lesson."
Jack noticed that for the first time since it had opened its eyes, the rakosh turned its glare from him; it refocused on the newcomer.
"Here he is, ladies and gentleman," the ticket man cried, turning to the crowd. "Yessir, the one and only Sharkman! The only one of his kind! He's exclusively on display here at Ozymandias Oddities. Tell your friends; tell your enemies. Yessir, you've never seen anything like him and never will anywhere else. Guaranteed."
You've got that right, Jack thought.
The ticket man spotted Jack standing on the wrong side of the rope. "Here, you. Get back there. This thing's dangerous! See those claws? One swipe and you'd be sliced up like a tomato by a Ginsu knife! We don't want to see our customers get sliced up." His eyes said otherwise as he none too gently prodded Jack with the pole. "Back now."
Jack slipped back under the rope, never taking his eyes off Scar-lip. Now that it was up front in the light, he saw that the rakosh didn't look well. Its skin was dull and relatively pale, nothing like the shiny deep cobalt he remembered from their last meeting. It looked thin, wasted.
The rakosh turned its attention from the ticket man and stared at Jack a moment longer, then dropped its gaze. Its talons retracted, slipping back inside the fingertips, the arms dropped to its sides, the shoulders drooped, then it turned and crawled back to the rear of the cage where it slumped again in the corner and hung its head.
Drugged. That had to be the answer. They had to tranquillize the rakosh to keep it manageable. Even so, it didn't look too healthy. Maybe the iron bars were doing it—fire and iron, the only things that could hurt a rakosh.
But drugged or not, healthy or not, Scar-lip had recognized Jack, remembered him. Which meant it could remember Vicky. And if it ever got free, it might come after Vicky again, to complete the task its dead master had set for it last summer.
The ticket man had begun banging on the rakosh's cage in a fury, screaming at it to get up and face the crowd. But the creature ignored him, and the crowd began to wander off in search of more active attractions.
Jack turned and headed for the exit. He'd come here hoping to explain Monnet's interest in a freak show, but that was all but forgotten now. A cold resolve had overtaken his initial shock. He knew what had to be done.