So, when Bluett abandoned them at a campsite on the edge of Village Odradek, the freaks were confused and terrified. Fat Durga went to work at once, playing the mama to her misshapen brood. She draped her gargantuan arms over several sloping shoulders and dispensed a rosy future. The freaks would stay together, she proclaimed, and remain a family. They would apply for a state license and get out on the road, on their own. This was the best thing that could have happened to them. No more suffering the pettiness of the mundane jugglers. No more living off an allowance from the ringmaster. They would form their own troupe and control their own destiny.
Jeta and Antoinette were comforted by Durga’s prophecy. And most of the others were at least calmed enough to sleep. But Chick and Kitty weren’t fooled by the big lady’s dreams of blue skies and gravy. They said nothing aloud, but they exchanged a lovers’ knowing look across the evening’s campfire. The look said: What do we know about licensing? What do we know about bookings and ticket sales? About promotion and advertising? About tent riggings? About union rules? About the twisting back roads of Old Bohemia?
The look said: What do we know about putting together an act?
Chick appreciated, even loved, Durga’s optimism and her way with a cheerful story. But what the family needed most in this instance was a new patron. Someone strong and smart who could guide them, keep the clan together and manage the business aspect of their collective life. While Durga sketched out the details of their gleaming future, Chick wracked his brain trying to think of a new and worthy patriarch. It was not an easy task — most of the circus owners in Old Bohemia made Tedeo Bluett look like a saint — and Chick fell asleep before he could conjure a candidate. And woke an hour before dawn with a hand clamped over his beak and a knife tip poking into his neck.
His eyes, wide with shock and betrayal, opened and looked out on Bruno Seboldt, the Goldfaden strongman, an authentic Hercules who had joined the troupe a year before, hiring on during a matinee in Krappl. Bruno, who could burst iron chains and heave a dozen clowns the length of the tent and lift a small horse straight over his head, was said, from the start, to be a wanted man. He had never warmed to the freaks. And now it looked like he was ready to murder at least one of them.
But after a horrible moment of mutual staring, Bruno sheathed his knife into his boot, brought a sausage of a finger to his mustache-hidden lips and made a shushing sound. Then he released Chick’s beak and motioned to the trees beyond the campfire. Chick rose silently, stepped over a sleeping Kitty and followed the strongman into the woods.
“You almost scared me to death,” Chick said to Bruno’s back.
Bruno found a stump and sat on it, which brought his head even with the still-standing Chick’s. Despite the nighttime cool, the big man wore a training shirt that exposed his enormous arms and the identical tattoos on each — pictures of Atlas hoisting the earth. Bruno kept his eyes on the ground, as if, even in the shadows, he could not bring himself to look at the chicken boy.
“If I had wanted you dead,” Bruno said, “I would be roasting you on a spit right now.”
It was always an unsettling image, no matter how often he heard it, and Chick allowed himself a shudder.
“What’s all this about?” he asked. “You’re rid of us. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Bruno shook his head.
“It’s McGee,” he said, scratching the back of his skull. “He says you’re all abominations. That if we just let you go free, you’ll only find another circus that will take you in.”
It was as if someone had read Chick’s mind, though he knew that Flora Kino, the troupe’s resident gypsy, was more grifter than psychic.
“And what business is that of yours?” Chick asked. “You don’t have to look at us anymore. You don’t have to share the tent or the trailers with us. You got what you wanted.”
Moonlight reflected off Bruno’s forehead.
“McGee says it’s too dangerous. The competition is fierce these days. We can’t afford to lose our audience to the monsters.”
Chick nodded, unable to hide from the logic. At a loss, he simply said, “And what do you think, Bruno?”
The strongman scratched at his cheek, pulled on his mustache. Finally he rose from the stump, came forward, and towered over Chick.
“I don’t like the lot of you,” he said. “But McGee is on his way. He plans on butchering every last one of you. And I couldn’t let that happen.”
“What will you do,” Chick asked, trying to look into the dark woods behind Bruno, “when he gets here?”
Bruno’s hands went to his hips and his head tilted just a bit toward a shoulder.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that there might be a solution to this problem.”
It was at this moment that Chick felt the first symptoms of the seizure. It came as an instantaneous wallop of déjà vu, accompanied by a cold rush of current up his spine and into his brain. He staggered, regrouped, and asked, “What do you mean?”
Maybe it was the darkness or perhaps his self-absorption in the moment, but Bruno didn’t notice the change in the chicken boy.
“I mean,” Bruno said, “what if you left?”
“Left?” repeated Chick as his stomach began to churn and his eyes to lose focus.
“Yes,” said Bruno, warming to his idea as it took on weight with his words. “What if you left the country? Got out of Bohemia? Especially you. You’re always reading those newspapers and pamphlets about Gehenna. You could go there. You could take all of them with you.”
“Go to Gehenna?” in a breathy whisper, as if voicing a dangerous heresy.
“I know a man,” said Bruno, anxious to keep talking, to continue rolling out his plan. “He used to come by the gym in Maisel. We would play cards together sometimes. He has a boat. A ship. He owes me a favor. I could get you passage. To Gehenna.”
“Why would you do this for us?” Chick asked.
And Bruno muttered, “I won’t have murder on my hands again.”
No man ever spoke with more sincerity or better intention. But the vow proved impossible. Before they could wake the rest of the freaks and decamp the area, they were ambushed by Shoshone McGee, nastily drunk and thirsty for freak blood. He came out of the tree line with a knife in each hand, raving, screaming like a demon, promising rape and dismemberment and lingering death to the filthy abominations. And then he saw Bruno Seboldt.
“Betrayer,” he screamed and charged with both knives outstretched.
For a huge man, Bruno was nimble and fast. And, of course, it helped that McGee was wretched with alcohol. Bruno sidestepped the attack, knocked the madman to the ground with a blow to the neck, came down on the knife thrower’s back as if genuflecting, and in a single, fluid motion, took McGee’s head in his bulging arms, like a soccer ball, and twisted it until the neck snapped. It happened in an instant, a child quieting a baby goose.
The sleeping freaks woke with McGee’s war cry just in time to witness the killing. Everyone remained on the ground, silent and in shock, except for Antoinette, who crawled into Durga’s arms and began to whimper.
Bruno got to his feet and heaved a sigh and said to Chick, “We don’t have much time. Help me bury him.”
But the chicken boy was in the midst of a full-blown seizure, his arms and legs twitching, his eyes rolled up past his lids, a soupy bile running from his beak. He was in the Limbo now, the place of visions, of warning and prophecy. Where the voice of the father spoke its cryptic messages of possible salvation.
On this night of expulsion and killing Chick had his first vision of Gehenna. And of his nemesis, the mad doctor called Fliess. And of the doctor’s laboratory, a clifftop castle called the Black Iron Clinic.