“He’s gone…”
“He was here, we swear!” said Jim. “One hundred and fifty, two hundred years old, and dying of it!”
“Jim” said Will.
The four men stirred uneasily.
“They must’ve taken him in a tent.” Will started off. A policeman took his elbow.
“Did you say one hundred and fifty years old?” he asked Jim. “Why not three hundred?”
“Maybe he was! Oh God.” Jim turned, yelling. “Mr Cooger! We brought help!”
Lights blinked on in the Freak Tent. The huge banners out front rumbled and lashed as arc lights flushed over them. The police glanced up. MR SKELETON, THE DUST WITCH, THE CRUSHER, VESUVIO THE LAVA SIPPFR! danced soft, big, painted each on its separate flag.
Jim paused by the rustling freak show entry.
“Mr Cooger?” he pleaded. “You…there?”
The tent flaps mouthed out a warm lion air.
“What?” asked a policeman.
Jim read the moving flaps.
“They said “yes.” They said, “Come in.”
Jim stepped through. The others followed.
Inside they squinted through crisscrossed tent pole shadows to the high freak platforms and all the world-wandered aliens, crippled of face of bone, of mind, waiting there.
At a rickety card table nearby four men sat playing orange, lime-green, sun-yellow cards printed with moon beasts and winged sun-symbolled men. Here the akimbo Skeleton one might play like a piccolo; here the Blimp who could be punctured every night, pumped up at dawn; here the midget known as The Wart who could be mailed parcel post dirt-cheap; and next to him an even littler accident of cell and time, a Dwarf so small and perched in such a way you could not see his face behind the cards clenched before him in arthritic and tremulous oak-gnarled fingers.
The Dwarf! Will started. Something about those hands! Familar, familiar. Where? Who? What? But his eyes snapped on.
There stood Monsieur Guillotine, black tights, black long stockings, black hood over head, arms crossed over his chest, stiff straight by his chopping machine the blade high in the tent sky, a hungry knife all flashes and meteor shine, much desiring to cleave space. Below, in the head cradle, a dummy sprawled waiting quick doom.
There stood the Crusher, all ropes and tendons, all steel and iron all bone-monger, jaw-cruncher, horseshoe-taffy-puller.
And there the Lava Sipper, Vesuvio of the chafed tongue, of the scalded teeth, who spun scores of fireballs up, hissing in a ferris of flame which streaked shadows along the tent roof.
Nearby, in booths, another thirty freaks watched the fires fly until the Lava Sipper glanced, saw intruders, and let his universe fall. The suns drowned in a water tub.
Steam billowed. All froze in a tableau.
An insect stopped buzzing.
Will glanced swiftly.
There, on the biggest stage, a tattoo needle poised like a blowgun dart in his rose-crusted hand, stood Mr Dark, the Illustrated Man.
His picture crowds flooded raw upon his flesh. Stripped bare to the navel, he had been stinging himself, adding a picture to his left palm with this dragonfly contraption. Now with the insect droned dead in his hand, he wheeled. But Will, staring beyond him, cried:
“There he is! There’s Mr Cooger!”
The police, the internes, quickened.
Behind Mr Dark sat the Electric Chair.
In this chair sat a ruined man, last seen strewn wheezing in a collapse of bones and albino wax on the broken carousel. Now he was erected, propped, strapped in this device full of lightning power.
“That’s him! He was…dying.”
The Blimp ascended to his feet.
The Skeleton spun about, tall.
The Wart flea-hopped to the sawdust.
The Dwarf let fall his cards and flirted his now mad, now idiot eyes ahead, around, over.
I know him, thought Will. Oh. God, what they’ve done to him!
The lightning-rod salesman!
That’s who it was. Squeezed tight, smashed small, convulsed by some terrible nature into a clenched fist of humanity…
The seller of lightning-rods.
But now two things happened with beautiful promptitude.
Monsieur Guillotine cleared his throat.
And the blade, above, in the canvas sky, like a homing hawk scythed down. Whisper-whisk-slither-thunder-rush-wham!
The dummy head, chop-cut, fell.
And falling, looked like Will’s own head, own face, destroyed.
He wanted, he did not want, to run lift the head turn it to see if it held his own profile. But how could you ever dare do that? Never, never in a billion years, could one empty that wicker basket.