More tense minutes crawled by. Maybe Kurt hadn't been permitted to come up after all, or maybe they'd have to come back tomorrow and try again. But then the chain rattled a little, tensed. Frantically George waved his arms and barked orders. The cage was wheeled in place. The muscle men had been briefed on what to expect. At the first sign of trouble George would scream the pre-arranged code words—"drop the chain"—at which point they'd drop the chain, sending Kurt back below.
The lumberjacks heaved, dragged. Gradually a figure—even smaller than George had envisioned—appeared against the tunnel's orange glow. Soon Kurt was so close they could see he looked relatively human from the collarbone up. The rest of him was more like a blackened skeleton of mismatched bones tangled together. The familiar thick lips curved up in a puzzled smile. George shivered, hatred and pleasure all mixed up. He spoke into the megaphone, "Welcome back, brother."
"George. What is all this? Rather a fine surprise."
"Oh, it gets better Kurt." More frantic arm waving. The muscle men got into position. Kurt passed through the tunnel's outer lip, the chain passed through the cage, and George screamed, "Go! Now!"
Struts were hit away; bolts snapped. Wood and metal fell in place. Kurt's smile crawled away and died somewhere. His eyes glared straight ahead. George cackled, danced, giggled, and capered. The lumberjacks tossed a black tarp over the cage, leaving only Kurt's head exposed. They wheeled him to the freak show tent, where Kurt's head was put inside a custom made glass case. In the darkness of the freak show, with some careful lighting, the bulk of him was hidden, leaving the illusion that only Kurt's head remained.
When he could at last rein in his laughter and wisecracks, George reached into the glass case and patted the head. "Welcome to your new job," he said. A sharp stick was leaned against the glass case; a sign hammered into the ground nearby said: poke the freak—see him change!
"Brother George, do you suppose some food—"
"Oh, sure," George said. "First we better test this out, don't you think? Before the tricks come through. Thousands and thousands of tricks, Kurt. Too many to count, as the years crawl by." George had first poke. Kurt still glowered straight ahead, his cheek and forehead dipping in with each sharp jab. Slowly, slowly the color rose in his cheeks until they flared crimson. George went till his arm got tired. "Who's next?" he said, passing the stick to the nearest lumberjack.
By the day's end nearly everyone had been through the freak show tent for their turn, with George making damned sure no one missed out. It took the fifteenth carny poking away before Kurt's face split open, elongated and shifted. The growl from his throat made the carny flee the tent. It was many hours after the last poke that his face resumed its more human appearance. In all, an effective freak show gimmick, George reckoned. He sprinkled some flakes of fish food into the tank, and drizzled in a little water. "You'll be a star, big brother," he said, having a few more jabs while Kurt silently licked up the food, eyes boring hard straight ahead, staring, staring until a black cloth fell over the tank.
***
5. ABOVE
Jamie could not help looking sidelong at Goshy every few seconds in fear of another outburst, but the clown seemed far receded behind his newborn boggle at the world they stole through. Dark streets and night traffic seemed somehow far away, though their oversized shoes slapped on it like applauding hands, though headlights like stage lights now and then caught them flush in their shameless blare of pink, red, white, and green. A balloon would now and then festively bubble forth from any of the clown's pockets, including Jamie's, and sail toward the moon. Dean's and Jodi's heads flopped around with the movement but neither woke.
And no one paused to stare, as Jamie would have done were he walking or driving by. One or two people glanced around, perhaps half-hearing something, their eyes confused by a flicker of candy cane pink and white, but never truly seeing them. The shadows swallowed them, seemed to wrap like blankets and coats about the clowns, and for all his reservations (and a growing suspicion that he was hearing—at the very least—exaggerations as Gonko regaled him with tales of the clowns' heroic deeds) Jamie felt drunk again on some alien intoxicating fizz which had burbled inside him since the face paint went on.
"So as I say, helping people out is our passion," Gonko went on as they zigzagged across a street thick with jammed traffic. "Only it might not look so pretty to someone who didn't know how it all works, dig? Same as a doctor who cuts someone open to pull out a bad heart. If you didn't know better, you'd say the doc was killing 'em, right? We got this place below, called the Pilo Circus. When you came to join us after we saved your bacon from a lot of bad juju, that's when an evil shit named George took over and started using the place for bad instead of good. He killed my whole crew, and I had to haul 'em out of the ground myself. You musta escaped. The deal now is, we make our own show up here in trick land, to compete, dig? We do it right and pretty soon, George will be gone."
Rufshod had stuffed a knuckle in his mouth to keep his giggling in check. Doopy's hand raised to ask a question, which Gonko ignored, though Doopy's confusion looked profound indeed. Now and then he whispered in his brother's ear, "You hear that, Goshy? We're the good guys now, you and me is the good guys. Ain't it swell?"
"So why can't I remember any of this?" said Jamie.
Gonko twitched, rubbed his palm over his face with irritation. "We dunno. Looks like George got at you, maybe hit you with the old suck-thought vacuum. You wouldn't be the first."
"Or maybe . . ." Doopy dropped to a whisper. "Maybe it was Mr. Bigbad."
"Who?" said Jamie.
"Gee, Mr. Bigbad. We saw him, back before Gonko dug us up, back where it's cold and bright and where they make you . . . they make you . . ." Doopy whimpered, fidgeted. Goshy emitted a puppy dog whine, and a flood of frightened tears poured out his eyes.
"No blubbering," Gonko yelled. "And no more about Mr. Bigbad. Jamie's gonna think we're nuts. Mr. Bigbad can't hurt you no more, Doops."
"Gee, Gonko, are you sure? ‘Cause see, he can do stuff, weird stuff, and has a beard and sits in this great big chair and tells everyone what to do."
They crossed a footpath bridge over a railway line. A train clattered past down below, heading south. When one headed past the other way, Gonko motioned to follow him and leaped down onto its roof. The other clowns dropped with various degrees of grace or clumsiness, Rufshod and Doopy managing to cushion their human cargo beneath themselves. Jamie stood on the edge of the bridge, hesitating a second or two before he followed the call of circus magic inside, threw himself out into the night air, whooped as he landed on the metal train roof as comfortably as a mattress. He lay on his back, watched the stars and marveled to be experiencing something different, something so freakish and weird that most people who'd ever lived would not think it possible.
The train began to slow as it neared Petrie Station, crossing the bridge over the Pine River. "Off!" Gonko called over his shoulder. Rufshod landed in the river's shallow and near motionless water, waking Jodi in the process. Her screams were drowned out by the train's noise until she was again good-nighted and carried up the riverbank. Goshy, naturally, plummeted head first to the dry ground and landed like a javelin, stuck fast from the shoulders down. Doopy and Gonko yanked his legs to pull him loose, but his distressed screams indicated he was happier like he was, so they left him. Jamie dropped down with catlike ease, again marveling at these new powers.