by Brian Lumley
…Back home, I checked it out in a book at the library. A mole cricket, sure enough—genus Gryllotalpa—an “injurious insect.” Well, the damn thing very nearly injured me, for sure!
So there you go, Diary: a flash-back of sorts, reminding me of those Thin People in Barrows Hill who might or might not have been a result of my drinking. Except now I’m pretty sure they weren’t. I mean, there are so many things in the earth—and on this Earth—that we don’t know about. Okay, so people know about mole crickets. Some people do, even if I didn’t. But what if there are other things, species that are unknown, that no one has ever seen? Or if they have seen them, did they know what they were seeing? And I’m not just talking about the Thin People…
So what am I talking about, eh, Diary? Well, it’s this new thing. Except (God help me) I’d been drinking again, and can’t really be sure. But I’m pretty sure…
A fair was in town. Now usually, these days, a fair is no big deal. In England they’ve sort of dried up, lost a lot of their appeal; not to kids—no, of course not—but among parents. I mean, who can afford them any more? The rides and sideshows are too expensive, and you need a cast-iron stomach to handle the greasy rubbish they sell from the fast-food stalls. What’s more, it’s a very rare fair that doesn’t attract rain. It can be bright and summery in the morning—“autumnal” in the case in question—but from the moment those big artics and painted wagons start rolling in, look out! Here come the thunderheads.
This fair, however, was unusual. It came annually, in late August or early September, and was as big as any three standard fairs rolled up in one…because it was three fairs joined up and working as one, creating what the proprietors knew would be a big local attraction on one of their last gigs of the season. Big, garish and very noisy, yes. Flashing lights, tubular neons and coloured balloons; the rumble of generators versus a calliope; the smell of grease, friction, sawdust; the hoarse-voiced Loreleis at hoopla stalls and coconut-shies, all of them vying with each other to lure you to financial doom; the penny slots, Ghost Train, Freak House, Hall of Mirrors—the whole bit.
I say the fair was “in town” but in fact it was in a field on the outskirts, the same field every year. For several weeks I’d been noticing (barely) the big bright posters. They hadn’t made much of an impact; wrapped up in my work, everything else was peripheral. But last Friday morning on my way into town on the bus, as I passed the field in question, I saw the first of the artics starting to arrive. Down the road there was a long string of them. And not a cloud in sight. It made a change.
Saturday morning, a friend of mine called me. Just out of bed, I answered the phone. “It’s George,” he told me. “Haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays! Watcha doing these days? Still tied up with your big-deal, high-pressure job? Still doing the cub reporter bit—that ‘Superman’s pal, Jimmy Olson’ sort of thing?”
“If you mean am I still a journalist? Yes. No big deal; I just like to write, that’s all.”
George was an interior decorator…that’s what he called himself, but all he did really was patch over cracked ceilings with wavy-patterned, quick-drying cement stuff, and then paint it to make it look good.
“Me?” George answered. “I’m free this weekend, and I wondered if you were, too.”
As it happened, I was. “So what do you have in mind?”
“There’s this girl I’m seeing,” he said. “She’s really sort of nice. Has a nice friend, too. So what do you say to a double date? The big fair’s in town, out my way, and I was thinking we could get together with the girls. Maybe have a few drinks, buy them some candy floss, win ’em a fluffy toy on the rifle range, maybe take ’em for a ride, and then—who knows? Take ’em for another ride? Know what I mean, nudge, nudge?”
I knew George and his girls of old. “You want to fix me up with a girl? Does she wear a collar? Is her bark worse than her bite? Has she won a prize at Crufts? Know what I mean—nudge, nudge?”
“Hey!” He tried to sound hurt. “That’s not nice. Gloria’s a really sweet girl. Also, a little bird told me she does a terrific horizontal snake dance.”
“What little bird?”
“My little bird, Gladys.”
I had seen George’s Gladys, and she really was quite a good looking girl. “So how does this Gloria compare—with Gladys, I mean?”
“They could be sisters.” (The liar!) “So, what do you say?”
“As to the girls: why not? As to the drinking: you know I’m off it.”
“So drink something non-toxic! I mean, it’s not like you’re a genuine, died-in-the-wool alcoholic, now is it?”
I still liked to pretend I wasn’t, or hadn’t been, and so I said okay.
We all make mistakes, Diary. And you know me. I make really big ones…
Sunday the fairground was all set up, ready to roll that night. I met George and the girls at eight o’clock at a little pub not a quarter mile from the fair. Pausing on the street just before I entered the place, I could hear a low near-distant rumble and the shrill squeals of people on the rides. The fair’s rotating, zigzagging, strobing lights were plainly visible in the gathering dusk.
Apart from George and the girls the pub was almost empty. I joined them in a small booth at a grubby table where a pint was sitting waiting for me, the froth still fresh and deep. No good to reproach George; after all, I was the one who had told him I could take it or leave it, that I was only a social drinker. In fact it was something of a relief to take that first sip and to lick the foam off my upper lip. And despite that they knew they shouldn’t, my spirits were lifting even as I sighed a paradoxically reticent yet appreciative oh-what-the-hell sort of sigh. What was it Barmy Bill had called me that weird night in Barrows Hill? A “daft young sod?” He wasn’t so Barmy, poor Bill…
After that…well, things just got sillier by the minute. I don’t know why I let it happen; maybe I believed in that old saw about girls getting more desirable the more drunk you get; which where this Gloria was concerned was going to take a whole lot of booze, believe me! But before I knew it, it was my round, then George’s, then mine again, and so on. Stupid, really. And Gloria didn’t get any prettier.
Diary, I’m not going to describe George, Gladys, or Gloria, (let’s just call them the Three “G”s) because that’s not what I want to write about—they were simply the reason why I visited the fairground that night—so excuse me if they get left in a remote part of what has since become my rather blurry memories, and instead of trying to fill in all the blanks I’ll simply cut to the chase, okay?
The fairground:
Now this year it was really big, and probably bigger in my slightly altered perceptions. Only slightly altered, yes. See, Diary, when I’ve got drink in me I don’t start raving—I just don’t think very well, that’s all. I can still walk a straight line…approximately. And I can still speak properly…well, more or less; so that folks who don’t know me too well probably wouldn’t know the difference. But I know it: that dull-numb-stupid feeling inside my head, that sure knowledge that I’m no longer in control, and that I don’t care. And I also know that if I go on not caring, then sooner or later I’ll do something, or something will be done to me, that will land me in a whole lot of trouble. It’s the reason I don’t drive a car. Though I intend to, one day, when I’m sure…
And then there’s the other side of it: the fact that once you’ve fallen off the wagon, it’s no easy job to climb back on again. Which in me leads to anger, because I like to think I’m stronger than that. And I am, I bloody well am! It’s just that everything seems to go wrong, seems to work against you, until you’ve put it all back to rights again.
So that, too: I was angry. Not so much with the Three “G”s as with myself. And there I was “suddenly” in this fairground, my head spinning just a little—and pissed with myself, with that weak area in my psyche which had failed to stop me at the first pungent whiff of a good brew—and the whirling lights, hurtling machines, clinking slots and jos
tling crowd not doing me a hell of a lot of good either. I think I remember thinking to myself, “Thank God it isn’t raining!”
The Three “G”s tried to lure me onto a gut-wrenching, whirling dervish of a ride. I knew that I’d throw up, and then that I’d feel wretched; so when they went aboard I made off, breathing as deeply as I could of the smoky, trembling air.
I remember burning my mouth and fingers on a plastic cup of coffee at a hot dog stand. And shortly after that—
—There it was in front of me: the Freak Show tent.
The freaks (they weren’t freaks really, just poor misshapen or peculiarly strange and ugly people—which on afterthought pretty much qualifies them as freaks, right? Oh, well!) weren’t drawing very much of an audience, so a handful of them had come out to parade in the night air and chat up the crowd. There was a Fat Lady who truly deserved the title; she was several inches wider than she was tall, which was around four feet six. Swaddled in diapers that were once tablecloths, under a frilly tutu of a dress, the wobbling slabs of flesh that depended from her thighs and buttocks hung almost to the ground. I could see she was feeling peckish, because her shining, vastly pouting Cupid lips were sucking on a whole stick of butter dipped in sugar.
There was no Thin Man—I was glad to note—but there was a Strong Man. His arms bulged massively on a frame reminiscent of a Challenger tank. But on the other hand his rather suspect legs were hidden in floppy track-suit pants. (No weight-lifter this one, I thought, not with his sparrow legs…but I certainly wouldn’t want to take him on at arm-wrestling.)
And then there was a girl contortionist in black and silver tights, walking on her hands with her feet behind her neck. She would “walk” a few paces in this mode, then pause and swing her body to and fro like one of those rocking plastic birds pecking at water. She worked this up to such a pitch that I thought her face would surely smack into the earth with the next swing; but after she got down close enough to snatch up a dandelion flower between her teeth, then she was done. And uncoiling herself, she proceeded to hop around on one foot while hugging the other leg vertically in front of her, its knee up under her chin and the toes on its foot pointing at the sky.
And finally there was the Tattooed Man, who also played the part of team barker. Now, I had seen his sort before, but never one with as many tattoos as this. On a spare, loose-limbed body not a single inch of space was wasted; he looked like the Illustrated Man from that story by Ray Bradbury. I was fascinated by the animals, the faces, the designs, the mazes, the colours. He was young; he’d spent half his life under the needle; he was in himself an art form and a graffiti gallery combined!
These weird people…just looking at them…it was all so strange, so startling, so dizzying, that in combination with the beer it set my head to spinning again, though at the time I had thought the fumes were beginning to clear.
The time…? How long had I been at the fair, anyway?
In the dazed, uncomprehending fashion of a man who has had too much to drink, I studied my watch: a little after ten twenty. Me and the Three “G”s had left the pub, oh, around nine, so I had been here for something over an hour. No sign of my erstwhile companions. But then again, who needed them? And that was definitely the booze speaking. I’m not normally that dismissive of my friends.
And the tattooed barker was up on a box shouting, “…cheap at half the price! So come on in, sir, madame, lads and lasses, and see us do our stuff. See the Monkey Lady, Jimmy the Legless Boy, Freddy the Fly, and Bela the Human Pincushion. Plus me and the gang here, all with new things to show you. As for myself—why, I could show you tattoos that even my wife hasn’t seen! So roll up, roll up! It’s cheap at half the price! Your money back if you aren’t completely astonished! Come on and take a chance, and be amazed when you visit the weirdest show on Earth!”
The Freak Show tent was on the outer rim of the fair, which was probably why it wasn’t attracting too much attention. There was something of a small crowd, but its people had only come on the scene to see what all the shouting was about. The center of the fair blazed with light and activity, like the hub of a miniature star-cluster. Here on the outer rim, however, where there was more space between the wagons, tents, and kiddy rides, this was more like the galaxy’s spiral arm: the light was dimmer and the shadows longer. And beyond this outer circle—there where the field reached out toward open country—that was like deep space, as dark as the hour.
Looking up, the stars above the center were faint, made dim by light pollution; here on the rim there was something more of a sparkle to them; outside the fair’s perimeter, they were like jewels strewn on black velvet. There was nothing to distinguish the sky from the earth…the night was a sea of darkness, or a wall of fine black mesh that rose on high, sprinkled with stars in its upper regions.
As I stared at one small cluster of stars, they momentarily vanished—just the slightest blink of an eye—and as quickly reappeared. I supposed that a cloud, or perhaps a waft of fairground exhaust, had passed between. But then there was movement out there, too, in the smoky velvet darkness between the tents.
The barker was still shouting the wares of the Freak House; his “gang” were doing their strange things; a girl with a small yappy dog was dodging in and out and around the legs of parties come to observe, trying to find a better viewpoint. And without warning, suddenly the clown was there…but he was surely the crowned King of Clowns!
I don’t know where he came from…he could only have come from outside—probably from the night-side of the tent, where some other member of the Freaks had helped him up onto his gear—but the way he appeared was like magic. Which was only right; for fairgrounds and Freak Shows and such, well they’re supposed to be magic, aren’t they? But whether or no, there he was, this clown on stilts, as colourful as the circus he belonged in, his head as high as the tent’s ridge-pole.
The crowd oohed! and aahed! as he stilted carefully between groups. And a curious thing: the other performers—all four of them—they seemed equally taken aback by his presence.
“Wow!” I said, moving close to the Strong Man. “Surely he’s too tall for the tent?”
“Eh?” The huge fellow cast me a frowning glance. “What, our tent? Oh, no, he’s not one of ours. In fact I didn’t know there were more of our kind here.” He nodded his great, bearded head. “He’s from one of the other fairs, for sure. But hey! He’s welcome if he helps draw in the crowd! Absolutely!”
And as the Strong Man moved off, I stood there admiring the clown on stilts; stood there swaying just a little, still dizzy with drink and fairground motion, as the people seemed to swirl around me, occasionally jostling me aside.
Apart from his great long stilts the clown was more or less typical of his breed…more or less. He effected a great red beak rather than one of those squashy noses; his tall, pork-pie hat sprouted green feathers; he wore a shiny black swallow-tail coat, its ridiculously long, stiff, curved tails hanging almost to where his feet must be situated inside narrow, horizontally-striped, green and grey pipe-stem trousers. The trousers seemed gathered at the “ankle” of the stilts, whose “feet” were three-clawed triangles of black plastic or painted wood…whichever, they were as shiny as patent leather shoes. And large? It could only be that these size fifteen pontoons helped him to balance.
The clown was blackfaced, hugely white-lipped under the beak, and wore red goggle-eyes that reflected the rotating, near-distant lights of the rides. His thin neck was enclosed in a green collar of some furry material, and he wore green gloves on slim, long-fingered hands. At his hips his trousers bulged awkwardly, “clownishly,” of course, and I assumed that these bulges hid or disguised the upper extremes of his stilts and whatever mechanism allowed him to bend his legs where his feet (now his clown knees) would be. Without doubt his was a clever get-up, despite that his jerking movements must be hellishly difficult to orchestrate.
The young girl with the yappy dog was one of the main jostlers. “I can’t see, I
can’t see!” she was muttering, tugging at my elbow. “Mister, can I get in front?” But as I let her get by me she dropped the dog’s lead. And off he went, straight as the proverbial arrow to his target: the Freaks where they clustered around the new kid on the block.
“Woofy, come back here!” the girl, maybe nine or ten years old (God only knows what she was doing out on her own—or with the dog—so late at night!) cried after him. But Woofy wasn’t listening. Excited, and like myself fascinated, he was going to get as close as doggily possible to these peculiar people.
I detected an odour. But…there are smells and there are smells. And sometimes they’ll bring back memories of events you thought were long forgotten. Like that time when I was a little kid and my lips were chapped. A girl I fancied at school loaned me this clear lip-salve in a propelling lipstick-like tube; its smell was not quite peppermint, and I’ve never come across that smell again. But the moment I think of that little girl, everything comes back to me as clear as yesterday—especially that smell.
That was a nice thing; other things aren’t. For example:
I remember another time from my childhood, and in fact from another fairground, but this one in the spring when I was maybe as young as the girl with the dog. It was the year of the cockchafer, the May bug. At least I think that’s what they were. Me and my lot, the kids I knocked about with, had our own name for them: we called them shit-beetles, because of the stench if you crushed one. And they were big, nasty, flying shit-beetles.
I had this friend, Stanley. Even as a child and long before pubescence he was plagued with acne, pimples, boils, whelkiness in general. And Stanley had some money! We penniless kids could only look on in envy while Stanley whirled on high, flung round and round in his Flying Chair. But as the ride began to slow he was crying; and as the centrifugal force lessened and his chair fell from the near-horizontal to the vertical, where Stanley’s feet touched down on the ride’s boards, he was disgusting!