We threw away our plastic glasses, and we shuffled into
The Sixth Room
“Presenting,” announced the ringmaster, “The Painmaker!”
The spotlight swung up to reveal an abnormally thin young man in bathing trunks, hanging from hooks through his nipples. Two of the punk girls helped him down to the ground, and handed him his props. He hammered a six-inch nail into his nose, lifted weights with a piercing through his tongue, put several ferrets into his bathing trunks, and, for his final trick, allowed the taller of the punk girls to use his stomach as a dartboard for accurately flung hypodermic needles.
“Wasn’t he on the show, years ago?” asked Jane.
“Yeah,” said Jonathan. “Really nice guy. He lit a firework held in his teeth.”
“I thought you said there were no animals,” said Miss Finch. “How do you think those poor ferrets feel about being stuffed into that young man’s nether regions?”
“I suppose it depends mostly on whether they’re boy ferrets or girl ferrets,” said Jonathan, cheerfully.
The Seventh Room
contained a rock-and-roll comedy act, with some clumsy slapstick. A nun’s breasts were revealed, and the hunchback lost his trousers.
The Eighth Room
was dark. We waited in the darkness for something to happen. I wanted to sit down. My legs ached, I was tired and cold, and I’d had enough.
Then someone started to shine a light at us. We blinked and squinted and covered our eyes.
“Tonight,” an odd voice said, cracked and dusty. Not the ringmaster, I was sure of that. “Tonight, one of you shall get a wish. One of you will gain all that you desire, in the Cabinet of Wishes Fulfill’d. Who shall it be?”
“Ooh. At a guess, another plant in the audience,” I whispered, remembering the one-handed man in the fourth room.
“Shush,” said Jane.
“Who will it be? You sir? You madam?” A figure came out of the darkness and shambled toward us. It was hard to see him properly, for he held a portable spotlight. I wondered if he were wearing some kind of ape costume, for his outline seemed inhuman, and he moved as gorillas move. Perhaps it was the man who played the Creature. “Who shall it be, eh?” We squinted at him, edged out of his way.
And then he pounced. “Aha! I think we have our volunteer,” he said, leaping over the rope barrier that separated the audience from the show area around us. Then he grabbed Miss Finch by the hand.
“I really don’t think so,” said Miss Finch, but she was being dragged away from us, too nervous, too polite, fundamentally too English to make a scene. She was pulled into the darkness, and she was gone to us.
Jonathan swore. “I don’t think she’s going to let us forget this in a hurry,” he said.
The lights went on. A man dressed as a giant fish then proceeded to ride a motorbike around the room several times. Then he stood up on the seat as it went around. Then he sat down and drove the bike up and down the walls of the room, and then he hit a brick and skidded and fell over, and the bike landed on top of him.
The hunchback and the topless nun ran on and pulled the bike off the man in the fish-suit and hauled him away.
“I just broke my sodding leg,” he was saying, in a dull, numb voice. “It’s sodding broken. My sodding leg,” as they carried him out.
“Do you think that was meant to happen?” asked a girl in the crowd near to us.
“No,” said the man beside her.
Slightly shaken, Uncle Fester and the vampire woman ushered us forward, into
The Ninth Room
where Miss Finch awaited us.
It was a huge room. I knew that, even in the thick darkness. Perhaps the dark intensifies the other senses; perhaps it’s simply that we are always processing more information than we imagine. Echoes of our shuffling and coughing came back to us from walls hundreds of feet away.
And then I became convinced, with a certainty bordering upon madness, that there were great beasts in the darkness, and that they were watching us with hunger.
Slowly the lights came on, and we saw Miss Finch. I wonder to this day where they got the costume.
Her black hair was down. The spectacles were gone. The costume, what little there was of it, fitted her perfectly. She held a spear, and she stared at us without emotion. Then the great cats padded into the light next to her. One of them threw its head back and roared.
Someone began to wail. I could smell the sharp animal stench of urine.
The animals were the size of tigers, but unstriped; they were the color of a sandy beach at evening. Their eyes were topaz, and their breath smelled of fresh meat and of blood.
I stared at their jaws: the saber teeth were indeed teeth, not tusks: huge, overgrown fangs, made for rending, for tearing, for ripping meat from the bone.
The great cats began to pad around us, circling slowly. We huddled together, closing ranks, each of us remembering in our guts what it was like in the old times, when we hid in our caves when the night came and the beasts went on the prowl; remembering when we were prey.
The Smilodons, if that was what they were, seemed uneasy, wary. Their tails switched whiplike from side to side impatiently. Miss Finch said nothing. She just stared at her animals.
Then the stocky woman raised her umbrella and waved it at one of the great cats. “Keep back, you ugly brute,” she told it.
It growled at her and tensed back, like a cat about to spring.
The stocky woman went pale, but she kept her umbrella pointed out like a sword. She made no move to run in the torchlit darkness beneath the city.
And then it sprang, batting her to the ground with one huge velvet paw. It stood over her, triumphantly, and roared so deeply that I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. The stocky woman seemed to have passed out, which was, I felt, a mercy: with luck, she would not know when the bladelike fangs tore at her old flesh like twin daggers.
I looked around for some way out, but the other tiger was prowling around us, keeping us herded within the rope enclosure, like frightened sheep.
I could hear Jonathan muttering the same three dirty words, over and over and over.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?” I heard myself say.
“I think so,” said Jane.
Then Miss Finch pushed her way through the rope barrier, and she took the great cat by the scruff of its neck and pulled it back. It resisted, and she thwacked it on the nose with the end of her spear. Its tail went down between its legs, and it backed away from the fallen woman, cowed and obedient.
There was no blood, that I could see, and I hoped that she was only unconscious.
In the back of the cellar room light was slowly coming up. It seemed as if dawn were breaking. I could see a jungle mist wreathing about huge ferns and hostas; and I could hear, as if from a great way off, the chirp of crickets and the call of strange birds awaking to greet the new day.
And part of me—the writer part of me, the bit that has noted the particular way the light hit the broken glass in the puddle of blood even as I staggered out from a car crash, and has observed in exquisite detail the way that my heart was broken, or did not break, in moments of real, profound, personal tragedy—it was that part of me that thought, You could get that effect with a smoke machine, some plants, and a tape track. You’d need a really good lighting guy, of course.
Miss Finch scratched her left breast, unselfconsciously, then she turned her back on us and walked toward the dawn and the jungle underneath the world, flanked by two padding saber-toothed tigers.
A bird screeched and chattered.
Then the dawn light faded back into darkness, and the mists shifted, and the woman and the animals were gone.
The stocky woman’s son helped her to her feet. She opened her eyes. She looked shocked but unhurt. And when we knew that she was not hurt, for she picked up her umbrella, and leaned on it, and glared at us all, why then we began to applaud.