Slimy Underbelly

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Kowalski gaped. The monsters in the audience screamed; some chuckled, thinking it was part of the show. But when Bela sizzled and fumed, his body boiling and flesh sloughing away to leave only a skeleton that crumbled to dust, people began running out of the Big Top. A few stayed and applauded.

  “I have to manage this crowd!” Kowalski said as he bolted away from me. “The show’s over—you saw it finish. Nobody’s getting refunds.”

  Disgusted, I held up the Air Commander medal and called after him. “I found this by Fazio’s tent—and I bet he also stole Aldo’s deck of fortune-telling cards.”

  Then I had another thought, realizing that the uproar would let Fazio know that Bela was dead—and the clown knew he was responsible. If the amulet truly had no magic, I didn’t know whether this counted technically as murder, but at the very least he had caused a deadly accident, messing with the vampire trapeze artist’s head before a dangerous act. Fazio had some explaining to do, and I had to stop him before he fled the circus.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called Officer Toby McGoohan, commonly called McGoo (by me, at least), and told him to roll the squad cars, that we had a death at the circus and a possible murderer to arrest. McGoo likes to hear things like that. He’s my BHF—my best human friend—and we’ve helped each other on many cases. I knew I could count on him now.

  First, though, I had to prevent the escape of a deadly circus clown.

  CHAPTER 5

  I expected to find Fazio at his tent, stuffing valuables into a hobo sack so he could run far from the Quarter. That’s what I would do, if I were a killer clown cat-burglar responsible for the death of a vampire trapeze artist.

  I did find Fazio in his tent, but he wasn’t packing up to leave. Instead he was wailing, outraged. “They stole my nose! The little bastards stole my nose!”

  The clown whirled to face me, and I saw that the big red nose was indeed gone from the middle of his face. More shocking, though: The fake nose wasn’t the only thing missing. Fazio’s real nose was gone, leaving a cavernous empty sinus socket draped with a few shreds of rotted flesh. The makeup had been smudged around his eyes, and I could see the sunken hollow look, the grayish tone to his unpainted skin.

  “You’re a zombie!” I cried, demonstrating my detective abilities.

  “Not just a zombie,” Fazio insisted. “A clown, too. That’s my true calling in life—and afterlife.”

  A zombie clown, I thought. Now that’s scary.

  Fazio moaned, covering the nose hole in the middle of his face. “All I ever wanted was to make people laugh.” Then he looked up at me. “Why are you so surprised? You’re undead, and you came back to keep solving cases. Why can’t I still be a clown just because I’m a zombie? Maybe that’s why I rose up in the first place—to make people laugh.”

  Actually, he wasn’t making anyone laugh that I could tell, but I decided not to argue with him.

  He touched his cheeks. “Put on enough greasepaint and a wig, no one can tell the difference. I still do my job.” A wave of anger passed through him again. “And those little goblin bastards stole my nose! I thought we were done with them for good! Last time they were here, the twins stole everything that wasn’t superglued down.” He let out a huff. “In fact, we tried supergluing everything down . . . which did prevent the thefts, but kept us from using the items at all. Bad idea. And then they stole the tube of superglue.”

  “Which way did they go?” I heard sirens wailing in the distance. McGoo responded quickly, especially when he knew he’d have a nice arrest on his record without having to do the footwork.

  The clown sniffled again—which came out as a loud hooting sound without his nose—and pointed out the tent. “They grabbed the nose off my face and ran that way. Somebody must be hiding them.”

  “What would they do with a clown nose?” I asked. “Can you sell it on an auction site somewhere?”

  “They don’t do anything with what they steal—they just steal it. It’s an illness. That’s why you find so many things just lying around on the ground.”

  I bolted out of Fazio’s tent, hoping to intercept the kleptomaniac goblins. The circus midway was full of attendees streaming toward the exits, chattering about Bela’s spectacular (and, most agreed, entertaining) death. Some unnaturals still insisted it was part of the show and were trying to figure out how the trick was done.

  Then I spotted another playing card lying on the ground and a necklace a few steps beyond that, then a baseball cap, and an eye patch. This was like a scavenger hunt. All of the bread crumbs were heading toward the fat lady’s tent.

  I heard a scuffle and a squeal, and I put on a burst of speed; zombies can move quickly in emergencies, or when they’re especially hungry. “Over here!” I yelled, hoping someone else would come running. I already knew Fazio was sounding the alarm among his circus friends, who were already alarmed after the death of the vampire trapeze artist (or maybe just because of the approaching police sirens).

  The flaps of the fat lady’s tent were down, but I yanked them open. I saw Annie struggling with her enormous dress, pulling down the fabric folds to cover her body—and the dress itself, or something inside it, was fighting back.

  “Quickly, my dears, quickly!” When she saw me, a look of horror crossed her face (I often get that reaction). She did not look like a sweet granny now; her whole face was much skinnier, as if someone had deflated her. Annie still had many chins, but they hung like wattles around her neck.

  As she struggled and thrashed with her recalcitrant dress, the fabric tore, and a goblin’s smooth, ugly head poked out. The second young goblin also squirmed and broke free, ripping the dress to shreds as they both escaped from their unorthodox hiding place. Inside the tentlike flower-print fabric, they left behind a rather scrawny-looking Annie in a one-piece bathing suit. The goblins hissed and snapped, annoyed to be exposed.

  Goblins are like small, gray-skinned elves . . . if those elves happened to be born from a mother saturated with toxic waste and poisonous thoughts. Their huge mouths were filled with needle-like teeth, and their glowing eyes could have been used as a plumber’s utility light. As the goblin twins tried to scramble away, Annie wrapped her arms around them and pulled the creatures close to her in a motherly embrace.

  There was hardly anything to Annie now. With all her loose skin, she looked as if she was wasting away, despite the numerous plates of ribs, cookies, etc., she consumed every day. Then I realized that if she had been hiding the kleptomaniac creatures, they might have eaten much of the food.

  The fat lady’s eyes were wide, her expression desperate. “You can’t take my boys!” She yanked the goblins closer, practically smothering them. “I was trying to protect them, and they helped me when I needed it most! They’re so sweet.” She held out her hand, and one of the goblins tried to bite it. Annie giggled.

  More shouts came from outside the tent. Fazio, the now-noseless clown, staggered in, accompanied by Aldo, who’d thrown on his wig while he ran, as well as the werewolf lion tamer, who still held his bullwhip, ready to use it.

  The vampire ringmaster barged in right behind them, distraught. “The police are coming. What the—” He stopped when he saw the goblins. “What the hell are those two doing here? With all the arrest warrants—”

  As the kleptomaniac goblin twins tried to bolt, Calvin cracked his bullwhip, and they skittered back into Annie’s protective embrace.

  “I won’t turn them out into the cold,” she said with a sniffle. “They’re just misunderstood. They stole things, but they didn’t mean anything bad by it.”

  “Nothing bad?” Kowalski cried. “They stole Bela’s Air Commander medal. Without it, he didn’t think he could turn into a bat—and now he’s dead!”

  Annie was disturbed by this. “But he started out dead.”

  “I mean he’s really dead now!”

  “Well, I’m sure they’re very sorry,” Annie insisted.

  “The medallion was fake.” I held it up
so everyone could see the words Made in China stamped on the back. “No intrinsic magic.”

  Annie sounded defensive. “There—no harm done.”

  The clown and the fortune-teller looked at the strangely emaciated form of the fat lady. Aldo said, “What happened to you? You used to be so . . . so . . .”

  “Fat,” she answered.

  “I was about to say substantial.” Then Aldo remembered his priorities. “And what happened to my fortune-telling cards?”

  “I lost weight, thanks to your magic cards.” She sniffed, sounding glum. “When Harriet left the circus, I wanted to be in better shape to mother you all. It’s quite a job! I wanted to be healthy, go on a diet, so I signed up for a guaranteed Gypsy weight-loss routine. Mean Cuisine. I lost four hundred pounds—and now I can’t stop!”

  Aldo scratched his wig, which was already askew. “What did my fortune-telling deck have to do with it?”

  “I needed your cards, ones with real magic, and that’s why I took your deck six months ago.” She sniffed and made an excuse. “Well, you did leave them lying around a lot.” When the fortune-teller glared at her, she turned away. “I just had to have two specific cards, the fat lady and the skeleton. I superglued the cards together, read the spell from the Gypsy diet book, and this fat lady started to look more like a skeleton. Worked like a charm!”

  “Uh, it was a charm,” I pointed out.

  “But because of the superglue, I couldn’t separate the cards again. Impossible to break the spell. And I realized I was going to lose my livelihood! Being a fat lady is all I am . . . and believe me, there was a lot of me.” She pulled at the excessive folds of her torn dress. “Everybody loved me when I was a fat lady. Everyone wanted to hug me, lose themselves in my expansive . . . everything. I needed another fortune-telling deck, a fresh skeleton card and a fat lady card, so I could break the magic.”

  “So you stole my other deck, too!” Aldo said.

  “The goblin boys did.” Annie sounded ashamed. “You were much more careful after losing the first one, and I wasn’t exactly nimble enough to slip into your trailer unnoticed. The boys came back to the circus, looking for shelter and hoping to hide from the police, and I just asked them to do me that one favor. Unfortunately, once they got started . . .”

  Officer McGoohan and four uniformed cops charged into the tent, all trying to fit through the open flap at once, as if they were performing their own circus clown act. Fortunately, because it was designed for a fat lady, the tent opening was double-wide.

  McGoo’s a rough, tough cop who gets himself in trouble more often than the criminals do, but he and I have gotten each other out of trouble enough times, too. “Shamble, tell me what’s going on here.”

  I rattled off a quick summary. “Fat lady hiding kleptomaniac goblins in her dress, a vampire trapeze artist accidentally murdered because he couldn’t change into a bat, deck of magic fortune-telling cards stolen—among other things.”

  McGoo nodded. “Oh, another one of those cases.”

  The goblins tried to bolt as the policemen rounded them up, and Calvin used his whip with great enthusiasm as well as precision. Even after the goblin thieves were handcuffed, they snapped with their needle-like teeth, trying to bite the hands that arrested them. Fortunately, among his other useful defensive items, McGoo kept a roll of duct tape on his belt, with which he secured the criminal goblins’ mouths.

  “Oh, my poor dears,” Annie wailed. “They just need some love and understanding.”

  “They need a little time behind bars,” I said. “Or at least doing community service.” All in all, I doubted the stolen items added up to more than a misdemeanor.

  “There are other arrest warrants for those two.” McGoo was shaking his head. “And the fat lady was aiding and abetting.”

  “For petty theft,” Kowalski said, troubled. “Bela might disagree, but he never liked to accept blame for anything. He did sign a waiver acknowledging the inherent risk in performing death-defying feats.”

  Kowalski stood next to Annie. “The circus is like family, and Annie is part of it. We’re not pressing charges against her, and we’ll return all the stolen items to their rightful owners.”

  “Except for my magic deck,” Aldo grumbled.

  “I can track down another one,” I said. “Part of my services.”

  “And my Reuben sandwich.”

  “Can’t help you there. . . .”

  Without asking permission, the clown and the fortune-teller worked together—a victory in itself—to open the trunks in the back of Annie’s tent, moving aside the plates piled with cookies and gnawed rib bones. Fazio lifted out a bright red ball. “Here’s my nose!”

  Digging deeper, they also found what was left of the deck of magic fortune-telling cards. Aldo was dismayed as he counted through them to find the skeleton and fat lady cards torn in half, by which Annie had apparently broken the weight-loss spell; other cards were missing as well, probably strewn on the ground somewhere along the midway.

  The former fat lady wept, still clutching at straws. “Maybe if everything’s returned, there won’t be any charges filed?”

  “Suit yourselves.” McGoo shook his head as the cops wrestled the still-squirming goblins out of the tent. “Those boys have already gotten themselves into enough trouble, more than just robbing circus folk. They’ll probably serve a year in juvie, maybe get out early for good behavior. Or maybe not.”

  “Yes, they are quite a handful,” the fat lady said. “Even I have to admit that.” Looking longingly after the wayward goblins, Annie drew a deep shuddering breath, then turned to Oscar Kowalski. “I don’t suppose the circus has any use for a skinny lady? At least until I fill out a little bit? The spell is broken, and I’m gaining weight again . . . and it’ll be even faster when the twins don’t eat most of my food.”

  The ringmaster thought long and hard. “I could use someone who understands the circus—and business. I’m no good at handling the day-to-day paperwork, the administration, managing the employees. I’m a showman, not an accountant.” He propped himself up, snatched off his top hat. “I never was much good at the business side of things. You’d think a vampire circus would want to be in the red.”

  Annie finally brightened. “I can help. I can be like a mother to everyone. And if I manage the money, it’ll be like giving everybody an allowance!”

  Fazio had reapplied his nose, although his makeup remained smeared. He looked at the remaining platters of food. “Annie, you wouldn’t happen to have a banana-cream pie I could smash into someone’s face? Just for the gag?”

  “Sorry, dear, I only have cookies.”

  The zombie clown threw cookies at Calvin, but nobody laughed. Rather, the werewolf lion tamer caught them and munched politely.

  Aldo came up to me, smiling. “Thank you for everything, Mr. Chambeaux. You did track down the cards, and the thieves. And if you can find a replacement deck . . .” He held out his abbreviated deck of magic cards, shuffled them, and extended the pile to me. “Pick a card, any card.”

  I did, looked at it myself, then slid it back into the deck. “No, thanks.”

  Aldo frowned. “Don’t you want to know your future?”

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “I’d rather figure it out for myself.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kevin J. Anderson is the author of more than one hundred twenty novels, fifty-three of which have appeared on national or international best-seller lists. He has over twenty-three million books in print in thirty languages. He has won or been nominated for numerous prestigious awards, including the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, the SFX Readers’ Choice Award, the American Physics Society’s Forum Award, and New York Times Notable Book. By any measure, he is one of the most popular writers currently working in the science fiction and fantasy genre.

  Anderson has coauthored fifteen books in Frank Herbert’s classic Dune universe with Herbert’s son Brian. His epic science fiction series, The Saga of Seven Suns
, was followed by a nautical fantasy trilogy, Terra Incognita, about sailing ships, sea monsters, and the Crusades. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars and X-Files series and coauthored Prodigal Son with Dean Koontz. With Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, Anderson wrote the novelization for the new Rush album Clockwork Angels. For the Horror Writers Association, he edits the Blood Lite anthologies of humorous horror stories. He is also a prolific writer of comics and graphic novels.

  Anderson’s research has taken him to the top of Mount Whitney and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, into the Andes Mountains and the Amazon River, inside a Minuteman III missile silo and its underground control bunker, onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, onto the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange, and behind the scenes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC. He has climbed all fifty-four mountain peaks in the Colorado Rockies higher than 14,000 feet, and he has completed more than 400 miles of the Colorado Trail. He lives with his wife, writer Rebecca Moesta, in their mountain home in Colorado. Visit him at www.wordfire.com.

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  eISBN-13: 978-1-61773-115-0

  eISBN-10: 1-61773-115-3

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: September 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-6177-3114-3