by Jeffrey Ford
Mirchland and I, cautiously passing written notes, planned our escape. We were fairly certain the fleas could not read. St. Joseph was to be the spot where we would take our leave of the caravan. The plan was to disappear with the crowd at the end of Hibbler’s act, to mingle in with them and, once to the road, try to hitch a ride or run for it. Not much of a plan, but we were desperate. The correspondence we had going was voluminous, most of it pondering the fact that the fleas obviously intended to drain all of us in the carnival before dispersing out into the general population. We never saw news of flea infestations from the towns we passed through and wondered why the Minions didn’t spread out and share their horror with the rest of the world. Mirchland thought it was because they were building strength, increasing their numbers for an all-out assault on some unsuspecting hamlet in our path. I, on the other hand, thought it had to do with that part of their act where they transformed through accretion into the figure of a man. “Only together can they achieve their terrifying potential,” I wrote to the dwarf.
Just as we planned, when the evening show let out on our second night in St. Joseph, I met my friend behind the clowns’ trailer. He’d packed a small satchel he had attached to a stick and had a lantern in his hand, the wick brought down so as to only offer a mere glow. He was sitting on an overturned milk crate, his back against the trailer wheel, his feet off the ground. “Hurry,” I said to him. “Let’s go.” I was anxious to be on the move. As I stepped away from him, my other me noticed that he didn’t budge. Then I spotted his empty eye sockets, and spun around.
The fleas issued forth from the twin puckered holes where his eyes had been, two living streams of black. Single file, and if my ears did not deceive me, singing some kind of song in unison. I gagged, doubled up with fear, and fell on my knees. The fleas marched along the ground to within two feet of me and then drew together to form the word “sorry” in my very own script. Something bit my rear end, a warning that I’d not be going anywhere. To my surprise, they didn’t infest me. I supposed I was to be saved for a later meal. Returning to my trailer in a stupor, I spent the night scratching my ass, the itching from just that one bite an agony. The prospect of inevitably being overrun with them made me consider Ichbon’s method of scratching with a revolver no longer insane.
Granted, the fleas were shrewd, but the next day, after torching Mirchland’s remains, the caravan headed away from Missouri and back toward the heart of Kansas. Everyone who had been with the show for a couple of years knew this was wrong, but no one mentioned it. I surmised immediately what was going on. The Miserable Clowns, who drove the trucks that pulled the trailers, were taking us out into the plains, away from the towns and cities. To be honest, I was shocked that they’d have the foresight or concern. When the fleas got through with us, there was nothing stopping them from overrunning humanity. The plan, as I perceived it, was to strand us out in the heart of the Dust Bowl and let them eat each other after they’d devoured us. In the end, if the world was to be saved, it would be saved by miserable clowns.
For the next three days straight, the caravan rolled at top speed, at first on a road, passing small dilapidated farms and one-horse towns, and then on a packed-dirt path that cut through the sandy remains of what had once been pasture. The sky was blue, but you’d hardly know it as the dust blew up around everything, choking the air and blocking the sun. Myself and I had to wear kerchiefs around our mouths and noses and something to protect the eyes from the blowing grit. I opted for goggles and my other me settled for an old wide-brimmed hat pulled low. The hours dragged tediously on as we passed through the desolation. Late on the third afternoon, when the caravan came to a halt somewhere in the far-flung dry heart of America, the clowns were informed by Hibbler that there would be no more driving. The fleas needed to perform.
The trailers were gathered into a half circle as the night came on and then lit by lanterns and torches. There was no paying public for a hundred miles in any direction. We performers were to be the audience. There wasn’t any choice. We gathered on folding chairs, forming a half circle around Hibbler and a small, makeshift stage for the fleas. The old man wore his graduation gown instead of his tuxedo and top hat. He stood before us, weaving to and fro, with an insipid smile on his face. When the crowd quieted down, he lifted the graduation robe over his head and dropped it on the ground. One more horror to add to the onslaught: a completely naked Hibbler stood before us.
There were audible groans from the crowd and someone in a most pitiful voice whispered, “No more.” As if those words were the cue, the old man’s entire body was covered instantly by fleas. It happened so fast, I thought it was a trick of shadows from the torchlight. But no, every inch of him, instantly. His screams were muffled by the Minions filling his mouth. They remained latched to Hibbler, pulsating en masse with the rhythm of feeding. And then as quickly, they were gone. His corpse remained standing for a moment—snow white, shriveled, sucked dry—before collapsing in upon itself. We gasped and rose to our feet, standing there stunned, wondering what would come next. It took no more than a moment for us to realize—this was to be the end of the road for Ichbon’s Caravan of Splendors. The fleas had somehow detected the unspoken treachery against them.
They struck again, covering in an eyeblink the slouching form of Hector, the Geek, making a mummy of him in less time then it took him to bite off a chicken head. As he fell away, they settled on the juggler and his apprentice. The Three Miserable Clowns stepped forward then, brandishing jars full of gasoline. They doused the writhing, flea-draped forms, and then the most miserable of them all flicked his lit cigarette at them. The sudden explosion knocked me off my feet. The next thing I knew, I was helping me up and we were running away from the caravan into the night. Ahead it was pitch black, and behind I saw flames engulfing the trailers, bodies strewn on the ground, and a man’s form made of fleas, tipping his hat to me and waving.
I ran at top speed like I never had nor ever would again, and when I finally stopped to catch my breath, at least a mile from the burning caravan, my other me admonished me. “Up you laggard,” he bellowed. “They can suck you dry, but I want to live. Get moving.” I pulled myself together and took off again. I wandered over dunes and across barren fields. When the wind finally died down and the sky cleared enough to let the moonlight through, I found an abandoned house, one whole side up to the roof covered in sand. Smaller dunes surrounded the entrance. Exhausted, I pried open the door, pushing a foot of sand away. Inside, there were two rooms. One was full to the ceiling with sand. The other was clear and had a rocking chair by a window that still offered a partial view of moonlight on the waste.
The next day, I awoke in the rocker to the roar of a black blizzard moving across the prairie. The approaching sound, like a locomotive, woke me. I ran outside to see it coming in the distance. Dust two miles high, rolling toward me, a massive brown cloud one might mistake for a mountain range. I’d survived the caravan and now I was to be buried alive. I told myself I would stand my ground, but the sand that was pushed ahead of it in the wind stung me everywhere, and I thought of fleas biting me. Before I turned and ran for the house, I saw it as Arvet had described: the face of Satan coalescing in the roiling dust—horns and snake eyes and maw open, hungry as a flea. I got inside and shut the door behind me just when it hit. Huddling in the corner of the clear room, I took off my jacket and threw it over my faces. The air grew thick with dust, and the noise outside was deafening.
That night, after Satan had passed, I dug out. On my march back to civilization the following morning, I came upon the carnival half buried in sand and tumbleweeds. I saw the drained corpses of my colleagues, even those of the Three Miserable Clowns. No sign of the fleas, though, as if the dust storm had sent them back into hibernation. I broke into Hibbler’s trailer and took the cash from the cash box—considerable given the success of the flea shows. I managed to get one of the trucks going and drove down to Liberal, Kansas, where I
eventually settled. I was surprised folks there accepted me for what I was, but then my having two faces was the least of their problems in those years.
I never spoke about the fate of the caravan, yet I often pictured it out there on the plain, covered over with blowing sand. A couple years later, I was volunteering for the Red Cross in one of their makeshift hospitals, treating those laid low by the dust plague, when I came upon a female patient brought in after a blizzard, close to death’s door. It was Maybell, the Rubber Lady. She was in a bad way, wheezing up clouds of dust, her chest rattling like a hamper of broken china. She remembered, called me Janus and smiled. In the evenings, when the ward was quiet, I sat by her bedside and we reminisced about the show and Ichbon and the appearance of the Minions. She told me she’d escaped being drained because her flesh was too elastic. That got me thinking and I said to her, “That’s the one thing I always wanted to know. Why they allowed me to escape.”
“I know,” said Maybell, barely able to speak. She motioned for me to draw closer, and I leaned in. “Hibbler told me it was that face on the back of your head. They felt some kind of kinship for it.”
I wasn’t sure whether to thank her for that, but my other me did.
Monster Eight
I ran into the local monster a couple of times behind the laundromat on my way home with clean clothes. He had a base of operations back there since it was only a short dash into the woods behind the place. That forest goes on for a hundred miles. I don’t know what he’s a monster of; everybody said he was definitely one, but I hadn’t seen it. He was just a fat guy who sat at a desk made of a plank and blue plastic milk crates. He had a hot orange scoop chair with three legs that he balanced on. For my money, he was just a sad sack. He was always looking at the woods over his shoulder, seeming to contemplate dashing back into them at the drop of a hat. A hairy motherfucker, though. You could stuff a mattress with just the crop off his back. And his conversation was self-deprecating but not in a humorous way. He was always apologizing for everything—the weather, his mood, the news of the day. A monster of sorry, I’d give him that.
So after having said hello to him when leaving the laundromat a few times, one day I stopped and asked him why he was sitting back there in a parking lot no one ever ventured into, save a drunk, looking for a place to piss, maybe a curious kid on a bike every blue moon, or me heading home from the laundromat on the path through the woods. He seemed surprised that I spoke to him. His eyes widened, raising his brows, and deep flesh moved around the horns protruding from his temples. Granted, the horn thing was a turnoff. Like what am I talking to? A buffalo? It’s not a good look if you want to be taken seriously. So I had to get past that. I swallowed hard and waited for my answer. He grunted a little and I could tell he was nervous. His leg shook and it rattled the desk plank.
“I’ve got business back here,” he said.
“What’s your business?”
“I do my monster thing.”
“Who pays you? Who’s gonna pay to get harassed by a monster?”
“I’m a pro bono monster.”
“Working for the good of the people?”
“That’s right. I want to create an epic experience for everyone.”
“How do you do that?”
“Get into their lives, and then I see what the biggest problem they have is, and I turn up the monster bs level to just above that. They battle the monster and survive and then their real problems don’t seem that difficult. That’s the gist.”
“What’s monster bs?”
“Could be everything from some light haunting, calling out their name in a spooky voice in the middle of the night, to shooting right up their toilet and taking a bite out of their ass. It’s all in a day’s work.”
“Sounds rewarding. I heard you bit the head off the Miller girl. What was she? Sixteen? Some collateral damage?”
“That’s not true. She’s in town right now, still tweaking. The kid’s got nine lives. People tell all kinds of stories about me.”
“My problem with the whole charade is that you’re not scary in the least,” I said.
“There’s scary and there’s scary.”
“Right, and you’re not either one of them.” I got kind of a thrill from telling off the local monster. Not wanting that feeling to fade, I added, “You’re more pathetic than anything else.”
“OK, OK, I can see where this is headed,” he said. He stood up to his full height. He was tall, maybe eight feet, and wide with rippling muscles beneath the red sleeveless T and hair and fat. My obstreperousness wrinkled away in the shadow of his stature. He came around the desk and put an arm across my shoulders.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Look, there’s no longer any reason for me to go on with this. You see through me. But, since you’re not afraid of me, you wouldn’t mind taking a walk in the woods.”
“Where to and why?”
“I may not be mythic but I’ve got something mythic to show you.”
“Well, I have to go through the woods anyway. What do you say you stop at my place so I can drop my laundry off? Then we’ll check out whatever it is you’ve got going.”
“OK,” he said and led the way toward the boundary between the parking lot and the woods. I caught up with him and as we crossed over, I heard him breathe a sigh of relief. We got on the path and headed northwest where it would eventually lead to my place out in the sticks on the edge of farmland. Side by side, we ambled onward at a long slow gait. He complained about how out of shape he was, apologized for it, of course. I asked him if he could at least give me a hint as to what he would show me later. He stopped for a moment on the trail, paws on hips. Looking into the sky, he shook his head. “All I can tell ya is it’s connected to the ideas of fulfillment and the growth of the spirit.”
“That sounds like monster bs,” I said.
“For real. That’s what it’s about. I’m taking a chance showing this to you.”
“Calm down,” I said.
The woods became a forest, the canopy thicker and blocking more light. There were spots where sun came down like a transporter beam from Star Trek and puddled on the path, but there were shadows too, and they were extra cold. Somewhere along the line, his complaints about himself turned into a story he spoke in cadence with our steps. Occasionally, purple finches darted above us. The trees grew taller as we went along, the oaks and pines like columns and spires in an enormous cathedral.
“I remember some real monsters,” he said. “For instance, my uncle, Ted. He was old school, tear ’em up, pop off a head, no reason needed. You know, just a total hard-ass. And he looked terrible, lumps all over him, a pig nose, nails that were claws, pointed teeth, a fucked-up face. He’d show up at a party with a pair of long knives and leave the place looking like a bad night at Benihana’s. Slaughter was his nickname among his friends. He ran with a crowd of other monsters who called themselves the Magnificent Seven. Seven monsters all impressively horrible. Each of them had a special trait and each a nickname. There was Bite ’Em, who bit people a hundred times in a minute, and one with the name Shit Breath Academy. He just opened his mouth and reality wilted. You get the picture. Seven monsters with more monster bs than you could shake a stick at. They were full of themselves, taking liberties with their mythic power, not to mention murder and mayhem in tall order. As they achieved the height of their power, there appeared on the scene a new kind of monster. He went by the title Monster Eight. And he let it be known that he had come to defeat the Magnificent Seven.
“Monster Eight was different, more reptilian, and had the ability to morph into any human form he had ever seen. His feet were molded in the form of high heels, his flesh was pebbled in red scales. He could leap, run fast, and was strong, but his most dangerous asset was his voice and what it said. In the end Monster Eight shut them all down, one through seven. Talked them right out
of their lives. Uncle Ted split his own head with a hatchet. It took Monster Eight seven minutes to convince the old dope he was better off away in the cosmic elsewhere. Once his task was complete, and the seven were gone, he disappeared. No one knows where he went. It’s said that he wanders the world, unable to die until eight centuries have passed.”
I wanted to hear more, but we were approaching my house. Lynn was on the porch in her rocker. I waved as we came out of the woods and walked across the field. I could see her stand up and go inside. The moment I saw it, I knew exactly what was going on. She went inside to get her father’s pistol. She knew immediately that I was walking with the local monster. As we reached the porch, I started up the steps, but she pushed through the screen door with the gun out in front of her aiming at my new associate. “Stay there,” she said to me. “And you,” she said to the monster, “you make a move and I’ll drill you with all six.”
“Have no fear, madam,” said the monster and put his paws up.
Lynn pointed her gun at me. She said, “Give me the laundry.” She reached down the step and I reached up. She took the stack by lacing a single finger under the knot of twine at the top of the package. In her opposite hand the gun wobbled and made me nervous. Once she had the laundry she said, “I’m gonna give you about two minutes to get that fucking thing out of here. Then I’m just gonna start shooting. You come home with the local monster? You’re out of your mind. Early onset, if you know what I mean. I can’t believe I’ve put up with 40 years of your stupid shit.”