by Kin S. Law
“Goat, do you think…I’m going west, and I could rightly use some help. Where I’m going—”
“This place holds nothing I cannot leave behind. I will come with you,” he said.
“But your family?”
“The Blackfoot, they do not see me as one of their own. And I have met my brother. We did not have good words. I would much rather travel with you,” he finished, and kissed her. It was sexual congress, just physical pleasure, thought Hargreaves, but his frankness made her think of the future. Being alone wore dreadfully. No, it was not impossible for her to imagine traveling with him, getting to know his secrets, finding out where her knee could reach…
“Your brother…Devereaux…” Hargreaves said. Funny Goat looked dour, an almost imperceptible sadness, but in that moment all the guilt in the world seemed to settle on his shoulders.
“Yes. He is in league with devils. But he is my brother,” Funny Goat said. Then he looked about, at Emory’s breakfast freshly cleaned and roasting by Baccarat. “I would just as soon be gone from this place.”
As if the revelation tore away some protective veil, Scream’s men found them not long into the day. Funny Goat and Hargeaves were coming back to Spelter via a roundabout route, trying to get to Alphonse. In the woods the sound of clanking boots was like hearing some dread hellhound coming after them trailing bloodied chains. It was more terrifying than the actual dogs.
“They will not bring fire,” Goat said. “The town’s wealth comes largely from logging and game. Devereaux knows this well, and will not risk burning it down.”
“Splendid,” said Hargreaves dryly.
They were in a sort of pass, between some large rocks that bridged a fearsome gorge. Funny Goat looked left and right, and then Hargreaves felt something hot and wet splash across her face. When she touched there, her fingers came away red. She heard a wet thumping noise.
“No!” said Hargreaves, whirling.
Funny Goat had fallen from the horse. He lay splayed across the sharp rocks, and his back was a red carnation of blood—he’d been shot. Hargreaves grasped for the reins, barely catching them.
“Goat!” she cried, but he was already pulling himself up, gingerly, careful of the stones.
“More men will be coming on foot. I will lie in wait here, where they must pass. They will fall,” he said simply. Already the wound seemed less than nothing, just a scratch. His face was flat as he worked his knife from his boot.
“But you are one man! There are surely—”
“No more than four,” Goat interrupted. He smiled, briefly, a gash that made his implacable face look unnatural. It wasn’t for him. It was for her. “And their armor will only slow them. My blood will draw fiercer things.” And then he took a nut from the backside of the horse, as if he were plucking a flower. The effect was as if he had slapped a flesh horse—it lunged forward, bearing Hargreaves and Emory quickly away.
“You tosser!” Hargreaves cried, watching as long as she dared. But she didn’t try to dismount, not with Emory clinging to her. She saw the first of Scream’s men appear, and the normally stoic Funny Goat suddenly roar with bloodlust, bestial and furious. She had barely gotten a few yards before the first of the men fell to Goat’s thrown knife, and she heard the screaming as his enormous gun barked warning. Then they disappeared behind the close of the forest.
The clockwork horse gave out perhaps a day’s hike from where Hargreaves had hidden Alphonse. It had run pell-mell, without stopping despite her best efforts. Only with its water gone and the last spark of life vanished from its eyes did it slow and finally stop, an iron statue in the wilderness.
Hargreaves dared not return the way she had come. Not with Emory, anyway. Wilhelm Scream was a scourge upon his own people, burning and ravaging in his own backyard. She thought of the Ghost Train, and what fell cargo they were filling the dread apparition’s hold with. She dared not think on what might happen if they got their hands on her again. So she set off on foot, still smelling the scent of tree bark and sweat on her skin. The men were not far behind her. But they were much lessened, and for that she had her paramour to thank. By the afternoon, the tears had dried to seasoned trails down her cheeks.
In the light of midday she found a cool deadfall to rest under, with not too many bugs and a nearby stream to disguise her scent. When she was sure the men passed her by she wept into a blanket, trying to quash a sudden and inexplicable grief welling through her. Who was Funny Goat? Someone who had extorted her freedom for her body. Normally such men made her sick. The thoughts helped, for a while, but soon enough her tears drained her fury, leaving her feeling sodden and cleaned out. And the child, Emory needed to be fed, with what fresh berries and some hardtack Funny Goat had left on Baccarat. That was when she heard the fallen boughs break, perhaps a mile back where she had come. And she had flown from that place on wings of haste and the knowledge that she was likely as close to Alphonse as she was to the militiamen.
Hargreaves had almost made it when she sensed something in the darkness. She froze, letting her gaze adjust, until an eye stared out at her, a thin sparkle of madness. The shadows parted for a moment, drawing back like a curtain as the clouds overhead moved before the moon. There was a cloven hoof, the thin scythe-shape of long horns, and impossibly, a long, thick stream of milky breath against the blackness. The swishing of a pronged tail lashed through the impenetrable dark, and the thing opened its mouth, a hole full of gnashing teeth and hellfire.
There, in the blackness, a devil had come to claim her.
Vanessa almost turned and ran, but the crashing through the brush had drawn her pursuers. Instead, she tripped and fell into a ditch, which dumped her into a long slide that came out under a familiar ridge. Behind her, she heard the unmistakable sounds of screaming, gunshots, sounds of people falling over themselves.
Alphonse was right where she left him. The truck had taken more damage than she thought, bleeding a pool of its vitals into the dry brush. She scrambled onto the automata itself, with the Cook box on its back, and tucked Emory tighter in the seat. She felt no doubt, no hesitation now. It was strange, but she felt as if the open prairie, the smell of the woods were fortifying her. What devil would take her, feeling as rarefied and pure as this?
Later, when the sunlight came lancing through and sanitized the landscape into its idyllic scenery, she realized what she had seen, indeed, what had saved her. She should have known―they were common enough. It was one of the refurbished livestock, with perhaps most of its front end replaced with machinery, invulnerable to the bullets of fanatics. The bastards had fallen to the frenzied kicking of a stud with iron flanks. Except it had been no bull, Hargreaves thought. She felt certain that in that moment of panic and murk, she had instead seen the wicked horns and strange eyes of a chuckling billy goat.
She felt certain she would see Funny Goat again. He was as tough as any of these animals, and this land was in part his land to begin with. It would take care of him. She wondered if perhaps there had never been a Funny Goat, if those old spirits had sent one of their own to help her through this madman’s paradise. But the comforting wheeze of Alphonse’s boiler and the soft breaths of Emory sleeping made it easy to put the whole thing behind her.
Station 4
Roadside Attractions
A road going from one horizon to the other.
Arid, windswept plains.
A lone lizard sunbathing on a rock.
Vanessa Hargreaves’ Feint flatbed rumbled through a tiny spit of land that might have been Anywhere, USA. Woolly bears crawled low over the rolling landscape. There were stretches of boundless prairie only passable by these plains dirigibles, cloud-like balloons slung with gondolas, full of steam-set society in the suites and emigrating settlers at the bilges. But down on the ground, the sun baked any normal steam engine dry within hours, and rendered any identifying scrub a monotonous portent of doom. That was the problem with this part of America, Hargreaves thought. One place looked pretty much the
same as another. The spit-shined fixtures, the monotonous straight roads, the inedible roadside food with not even a Fred Hornby’s to attend her coffee fix.
Hargreaves had doubled back through Idaho and down Nevada, through the desert and the hellish heat, to avoid any pursuers who might be following her trail. Not even the woolly bears ventured too far, so she was forced to jump from waystation to waystation, following their airship routes by watching the dirigible bellies. Sometimes she thought she saw the shark’s fin of a pirate airship, far out on the dry mirages.
One thing she had to give credit for, though: her arrivals with an enormous metal titan at the waystations raised no alarums. It seemed the wildness of the country made it easier to accept the strange and outlandish. Some of the junctions were just a few mooring towers raised up from the desert. Others existed in a pall of mystery, full of local gurus, Red Indian tchotchke sellers and pan flute players. Perched on cliff sides, sunken into lakes, even stretched across the tops of forests, the stations sprung up wherever someone had a still for whiskey and a steady source of coal. At one of them she found a group of freemen who had known Constance, and recognized Emory in her arms. At first, they thought she had stolen him, and the plausibility of that as a common occurrence shocked Hargreaves more than the accusation. Hargreaves left Emory with his distant aunt, who clutched him to her with a look equal parts suspicious and glad. That was all right. This child was dear to her, but he reminded her of her lost lover too well.
The plains pirates traded in every currency, even English poundage. In this way she had crossed rocky Colorado, flat Kansas, and wet Missouri, somehow veering South. Not that the stations were always safe. There were stories. There were rumors of spiders that would lay their eggs in sleepers’ faces. A hook-handed killer who preyed upon promiscuous women. Travelers sometimes found bodies hastily sewn into mattresses.
Sometimes it was difficult to tell if she had fallen asleep and ended up coming all the way around to where she had begun—the waystations and towns were more or less alike, and waking in one foul-smelling canteen was much the same as waking in another. The important thing was to keep the Cook box moving, like a can kicked melodramatically forever further down the road and away from evil. If she looked at the little memorials that cropped up here and there, she got the feeling that a single carpenter had come through and raised every single plaster structure, put up all the fences and sprinkled in the waystations just to give the illusion of hope.
So when she spotted a distant billboard way off on the horizon, Hargreaves’ spirits couldn’t help but pick up a bit. She pressed the throttle, mindful not to melt her tires on the hot dirt of the road. Soon the board resolved into an advert for the biggest ball of dirigible cord known to man. Some miles later, a derelict shack supported a hand-painted sign for a religious personage whose claim to fame was threading snakes through his nostrils. After that, the adverts came hot and heavy. There were unusual sculptures by the dozens, enormous pastries surely hardened to stone, and animals carved out of the most unusual mediums. Strange births. Martian visitors. Eldritch stones. Bodies of notorious killers preserved in pitch. Whimsically shaped houses were advertised as the apex of teapots, of tires, the largest bison boneyard in North America. Indian everything proliferated, with nary a turban or comforting curry in sight. Burlesque parlors sprouted by the score. At least, Hargreaves’ rather British mind translated those vulgar slogans into “burlesque.” It looked like the world’s biggest everything had been gathered in America.
At a Kansas City style barbecue joint far from Kansas City, Hargreaves watched a man nearly finish a five-pound brisket sandwich in twenty minutes, only to collapse vomiting to the floor as the establishment cheered. One of the attractions was interesting enough for Hargreaves to pull into the dirt track. It was a stone claimed to be fallen from the Laputian Leviathan that turned out to be an irregularly shaped boulder in a carved hole.
Eventually the deluge of adverts culminated in a series of extravagant placards placed at twenty-five degree angles to the road, a gauntlet of color and riotous rattling of the swill bucket. They all said the same thing.
Come One Come All! said one.
The Most Rollicking Show In Four States! said another.
Jugglers, Clowns, and a Gentleman’s Club! said a third.
And the very last of the series:
The Jango Brothers Rodeo and Circus. Exit Six off Route Thirty-Six!
“Why not?” said Hargreaves, for whom the endless straight road and unwavering scenery was a scouring purgatory from her own dark regrets. She took the exit indicated, feeling Alphonse roll against the straps with the sharp turn.
Some ways down the dirt track, the signs of festivity were already in evidence. A long rancher’s fence snaked down along the road to a small clump of trees, which hid what appeared to be a pewter statue of a Union soldier complete with ancient rifle. It was only when Hargreaves drew close that the statue came alive, pointing the way toward the distant fizz and bang of festivity. She made to continue on to the broad track lined with vehicles, only to find the statue had quietly taken up a post before her Feint’s grinning grille. She made a sound equal parts sigh and chuckle, before depositing a dollar and watching the Union man scurry back into a handsome salute.
Although the placards had advertised a rodeo and circus, the hubbub Hargreaves pulled into was less three-ring entertainment and more a loose collection of upstaging magicians, performers, and charlatans. A man boasted being impervious to pain. There was a woman with four teats. In one booth, a man sold copies of haunted photograms. Cowboys in various stages of nudity lassoed middle-aged women into their greased embrace, and there was a cowgirl, plopped onto a stage, dancing to some flyaway honky-tonk. To Hargreaves’ eye, the double-exposed haunted negatives were obvious forgeries. The four-breasted woman was simply well-endowed and familiar with belts. But the thrill each elicited from the crowd was real.
In the distance, the circle of train cars that had delivered the circus were clustered around three that had been converted to carnival rides. The boxcars were wider than most, and unfolded like charming puzzle boxes to reveal the whimsy within. There was a merry-go-round, naturally, a double-decker with miniature dirigibles and fanciful cavorting pegasi. A winsome pirate ship swung riders back and forth, pausing at the peak of its parabola. In the far corner was a two-part ride that made Hargreaves gasp. At one end of the train a cannon shot a capsule with a rider inside of it over the fairgrounds. At the other end an oversized martini glass caught the capsule in a flowing water slide, delivering it to a shallow pool. Barkers rolled the capsules merrily back to the cannon as their riders emerged from them.
“Only a nickel, miss!” said one of the barkers in passing. “Gyroscopically stable! Enjoy the lofty heights!”
“Not on your life!” said Hargreaves, laughing.
Deeper inside the circus began to make a little more sense, with magicians’ criers barking at the door and fortune-tellers telling of calamity and celebrity. Calliopes tinkled a merry tune. A juggler suspended the contents of a tea trolley in one corner, and another held aloft a rather dazzling selection of luminescent spirits. Fairy floss floated like little moons, glowing in the shimmering arc light hung high around the fairgrounds. Hargreaves found herself enjoying the spectacle more than she’d care to admit. The Ferris Wheel! The Ring Toss! The Strongman’s Bell! The hugeness of it made her feel small, childlike.
A series of high tents had been erected around three rings in the center of the attraction. The first two rings were flat ground bordered by wood, but the third was recessed, a pit dug into the earth. All three were empty. A number of pavilions had been erected to shelter an audience around them. Stepping through, their multicolored exuberance revealed a bar under the stands, and an impromptu whore pit, where Hargreaves was mistaken for an employee. She didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted, until she tried to buy a drink and a large, foul-smelling swine began to snuffle after her posterior. Before sh
e could react, one of his trotters closed on her ample bottom and squeezed possessively.
“An English rose,” he said. “But needing a prickin’.”
Hargreaves struck him hard enough to set her hand throbbing. She felt something crunch under her knuckles. There were far too many people in the brothel to shoot with impunity, so she participated in that noblest of traditions, the better part of valor. She turned tail and ran.
Which drew her molester and his friends out with her. Obviously.
She knocked over a collection cup and a brief havoc of scrabbling for coins followed her wake. Dodging left and right, the louts flowed through the circus like serpents in the garden. Hargreaves dispatched the first one by ducking into a blind corner, door-prizing the running man with a heavy strongman’s hammer leaned up in one corner. He went down hard. The second she managed to lead into an ongoing parade. Naked women with painted breasts cast batons and waved balls of fluff about, riling up the crowd. Behind them marched elephants, lions in cages, and floats full of peacocking people. Seizing a bag of gumdrops from a nearby stall she cast them behind her. Her pursuer slipped and slid right into the painted women. Hargreaves winced, as the batons and high heels fell upon the man. A nasty way to go.
“Hello, rose….”
“Bugger.” Hargreaves thought as a straight length of chrome appeared at her throat—a dirk. The man’s breath was foul, heavy, and likely a hundred proof. His beard scratched. Her hiding spot now became a dangerous niche where nobody could see.
“Gave us a merry chase, didn’t you?” He growled now, his voice gravel. “Open that mouth and I’ll slit your tongue out. Now guess. What happens to a rose when it gets plucked?”