Jekkalon took hold of her arm and pulled her back, and Xyrena came up and stood close beside her.
‘What the hell are they going to do with those?’ asked Jekkalon.
But suddenly it became horribly clear. Signor Serpente returned to the front of the stage, this time pushing a hospital gurney, with a grubby sheet draped over it. On top of the gurney jingled a tray of surgical instruments, scalpels and forceps and clips, as well as a kidney-shaped steel dish containing needles, sutures and swabs.
Brown Jenkin jumped up next to the gurney like an eager child and snatched one of the scalpels. With a rat-like chattering noise, he scurried around to the back of Maria Fortales’ chair and began to slash at the cords that bound her. Maria Fortales was screaming now, but Brown Jenkin ignored her, and Mago Verde was actually smacking his hands together in delight and laughing at her. Brother Albrecht heaved himself up even higher in his shell-shaped seat, using his knees for leverage, so that he had a better view of what was happening.
Once Brown Jenkin had cut through the last of her cords, three of the circus hands came forward and lifted Maria Fortales out of her chair. She kicked and jackknifed her body and carried on screaming until her voice was nothing but a reedy squeak, but the circus hands bundled her on to the gurney and strapped her down with wide canvas belts, one around her chest, one around her pelvis, and another round her knees.
Doctor Friendly had meanwhile lifted one of the snakes out of the cage. Xyrena didn’t know what kind of snake it was, but she guessed that it was venomous, because he was gripping it tight behind its jaws so that it couldn’t bite him. It writhed and twisted even more violently than Maria Fortales, so that two of the circus hands had to help him stretch it out on the gurney right next to her, and keep it pinned down.
Brother Albrecht’s eyes were blazing blue with excitement, like the flames from two blowtorches, and he repeatedly kicked the side of his seat with his amputated left knee. ‘Frau und Schlange!’ he said, in a voice quivering with excitement. ‘Woman and snake! Gerade wie der Garten Eden, noch einmal! Just like the Garden of Eden, all over again!’
Selecting a scalpel, Doctor Friendly held the snake tightly in his left hand, about eighteen inches from the end of its tail. Then, without any hesitation, he cut off those last eighteen inches, slicing through its muscle with his scalpel and then clipping through its spine with a pair of surgical pliers. The snake was thrashing so furiously from side to side that the two circus hands had to use all of their strength to keep it on the gurney, but Doctor Friendly continued his operation unperturbed, as if he had undertaken this type of surgery dozens of times before.
Mago Verde approached the gurney and bent over Maria Fortales, and underneath his green painted grin he was grinning for real. She had stopped screaming now, out of exhaustion, but she stared up at him in absolute terror, and Jemexxa could see that she was saying something to him. She couldn’t hear what it was. The crowd and the circus folk were all making far too much noise, but from the movement of her lips she was sure that it was ‘please.’
Doctor Friendly ripped off the adhesive tapes that were holding the thick gauze pad over Maria Fortales’ left shoulder. He pulled off the pad, which was caked with dried blood, exposing raw, half-healed muscle and a sawn-off stump of white humerus.
For the first time he turned around to Brother Albrecht and addressed him directly. He had a warbling, monotonous voice, almost as if he were chanting plainsong in church rather than talking.
‘This is now the most interesting part of the operation, your worship. And also, I have to admit, the most difficult. I attach the muscles and nerves of the human shoulder to the muscles and the nervous system of the snake. In this way, our dear young woman here will be able to use the snake as a substitute for her absent arm.
‘I will also connect the snake’s cloaca to the young woman’s internal organs so that it will be able to eat and sustain itself and use her digestive system to dispose of its waste.
He paused, and took off his spectacles. His eyes rolled around as if they were two planets in contra-rotating orbits. ‘These snakes are a crossbreed of both reticulated python and krait. Python for strength and size; krait for its venom, which is sixteen times more toxic than cobra venom. When she has both snakes attached in place of her arms, this young lady will be the most dangerous female that any man has ever met. They will not hurt her, of course, because they will depend on her for their very existence! But Medusa the Gorgon will be nothing compared to this charmer! Imagine the shows that you can put on, your worship! Challenge the men in your audience to make love to her, and see if they can escape with their lives!’
Mago Verde clapped again, and whooped. Unable to clap, Brother Albrecht closed his eyes and nodded his handsome head in tacit approval. The audience, both men and women, shrieked and whistled with excitement. They might have been dubious about Brother Albrecht’s freak show when they first arrived in his dream, but now they were growing ever more aroused. Xyrena could see that Brother Albrecht was aroused, too, judging by the bulge in his jerkin. He mouthed something at her, but it must have been in German, because she couldn’t even lip-read it.
Doctor Friendly replaced his spectacles, picked up another scalpel, and started to cut at the muscle of Maria Fortales’ shoulder. The pain must have been unbearable, because she found her voice and screamed even louder than before.
Xyrena turned to Jekkalon and Jemexxa and said, ‘Enough, already! I’m calling in Dom Magator. I’m not standing here watching this girl being butchered. You with me? As soon as they come busting in, Zebenjo’Yyx can zap that doctor and put him out of action. You go for Mago Verde.’
‘What about the Grand Freak?’
‘I think we should leave the Grand Freak to Dom Magator. He’s the one with the Absence Gun. One shot from that and that’ll be the finish of him. He won’t even be history.
‘John?’ she said. ‘Did you hear that? We need you in here like now.’
‘Busting in already, baby — have no fear!’
FIFTEEN
Skirmish In Hell
Soon after Xyrena and Jekkalon and Jemexxa had disappeared into the big top, every clown and circus hand and freak had crowded in through the illuminated archway to see the show, and within minutes the carnival grounds had been deserted, leaving only the animals and the quasi-animals sitting miserably in their cages.
Dom Magator and Zebenj’Yyx had cautiously climbed to their feet and looked around. ‘Clear,’ Dom Magator had decided, and behind his fearsome African mask, Zebenjo’Yyx had nodded.
They had scrambled over the ridge where they had first taken cover, and then they had dodged their way through the rain toward the big top. They had run with their shoulders hunched, like a two-man SWAT team — Zebenjo’Yyx keeping his right arm held out straight in front of him in case he needed to shoot off a sudden burst of quarrels, and Dom Magator holding up his Absence Gun, with his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.
The Absence Gun looked like a Gatling machine-gun, with five rotating barrels, except that the barrels were made of pale green ceramic and the gun itself had a stock like a rifle. It worked on the principle of quantum decoherence, producing a wave function which made it a scientific impossibility that its target had ever existed. It was the third stage beyond the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, in which a cat in a sealed box was both alive and dead at the same time. Anybody who was hit by an Absence Gun was neither alive nor dead, and never had been.