“Oh, go to hell,” said Stephen. “You wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Wouldn’t matter,” James had replied. “She’d know what to do. And she wants to fuck me.”
“Everybody wants to fuck you,” said Stephen. “You’re Captain Kip Blackwell, for Christ’s sake. But I have to tell you, Kip — that unenthusiastic flirtation you play at with her in the canteen isn’t fooling anybody.”
“It fools Alice,” James had said.
“You think?”
James set his jaw. Put his foot on the gas pedal. He took the road to the mill — then, following the wood smoke and tire ruts, made his way to the creek-bank where, according to Mr. Simmons, the circus was encamped.
There was no Big Top; not shooting galleries nor cotton candy stands nor halls of mirrors. The remains of the Twillicker and Baines Circus was mostly people, and those people had spread in a makeshift shantytown along the grassy east bank of the Chamblay Creek. Little tents pitched here and there, charred swaths of orange and green and blue fabric. Some of the folk had dug out fire pits in the needle-covered dirt. They were surrounded by trees, spruce and pine so high that from the camp’s far side, they obscured much of the snowy mountain peaks to the west.
James stopped his car and got out. The place smelled of wood smoke and burned fat. He tromped down the slope to the first of the tents — where a young woman sat beside an older man, broad-chested with a long, drooping moustache. He wore a battered felt bowler hat, and his arm was in a sling. She wore a pale blue cotton sun dress, mismatched with the torn fishnet stockings of a dancing girl.
“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 unusuaclass="underline" 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.