by David Marcum
I should have been more cautious poking around the camp site where the vans were all situated in a circle. After a long day and much travel, I felt I was owed my looksee. I didn’t consider that the owner might not be so keen to host gawkers who weren’t patient enough to wait for the exhibit to open. Before I was more than a dozen steps into the camp, a huge brute of a man blocked my path and bellowed at me.
“What’s this then? A snoop or a wee vagrant? If you’ve come looking for a handout, there’s nothing for you here. And if you’ve come to steal food, then a meal I’ll make of you! We’ve many a hungry beast to eat your flesh or gnaw on your bones.”
He’d been drinking, and drinking hard. The reek of liquor coming off him was enough to make my eyes water. He might have mistaken them for real tears as I tried to explain myself.
“I just wanted to get a look at some of Ronder’s animals.”
“Well I’m Ronder, the animals are mine, and looks cost money!” he roared.
“Meaning no offense, sir,” I said, seeing if politeness might subdue him, “I was ever so anxious for the circus to arrive.”
“We’re stopped to camp, not pitch a tent!” shouted Ronder. “You can see the show in Wimbledon at the end of the week like the rest of the paying public.”
“A peek was all I was after,” I protested.
“A peek is it? Well how about I give you a good look at the back of my hand? That ought to satisfy you!”
He raised his fist like he meant to do exactly as he said. Living on the street, you take your lumps more often than not, but getting struck by so big and angry a man, I expected it to feel like getting slapped across the face by a plank of hardwood.
“Please, Darling, it’s only a little boy,” I heard a voice say in the darkness.
My eyes had been clenched tight, anticipating the impact. When I dared look, after the blow never came, I saw a young woman, lovely even to a disinterested boy not yet drawn by the allure of the fairer sex.
“Eugenia, make yourself useful and feed the animals,” Ronder barked.
The way they talked to each other, I could only take them for a couple married - unhappily so. How so fine a lady ended up with such a bully, I can’t say. Matters involving love and wedlock - often mutually exclusive concepts - continue to elude me today even as they did back then.
“You promised you would help,” said the woman, holding her ground against the commands of her husband.
“Bah!” was as much as Ronder had to say on the subject, shoving me to the ground. He turned to join his wife, who was carrying two pails of raw meat, one in each hand. Ronder offered to take neither, but only spat over his shoulder, “Out of my sight and away from my property with you!”
I took his message, but not his orders, retreating to a line of trees not far from the menagerie encampment. The circus folk would have to bed down for the night at some point, and that’s when I would have my look. After coming all that way, I was determined to see at least one beast up close and personal. I would make my move with the passing of whatever night watch they put out, so I would have the most amount of time to get my sneak preview. Then I would report back to the rest of the Irregulars about what wonders they had missed by not coming with me.
Not twenty minutes later, the screaming started. A man and a woman were both at it, though the screams were not some argument, but rather an expression of pure terror. Lights were ignited all over the camp, in each of the occupied vans, as the show’s employees and hands were roused by the terrible racket. Being wide awake and on the lookout, I was running towards the camp to see what was amiss before anyone else. What I found beyond the trailers, where the cages were stationed, still haunts me.
One of the cage doors yawned open and Ronder lay dead, with the back of his skull stomped in. Closer to the cage itself was his wife, on her back, struggling uselessly to push away the lion that had pounced upon her and was now tearing at her face with dagger teeth.
All the other animals in the surrounding cages, aroused by the attack, were bleating a mix of alarm or approval at the bloodshed. Monkeys rattled their cages, great birds with long necks threw their heads back and squawked, and at least one enormous bovine beast from distant lands grunted and brayed at the carnage, doubtless concerned it might be next, even though it remained safely ensconced in its enclosure.
I stood gaping at the horror for what seemed like hours, but could only have been a few moments. Then men from the circus arrived, poles in hand, to drive the lion off Mrs. Ronder and back into the cage. With their hands full, I made myself useful and leapt forward to swing the cage door shut. Others scooped up Mrs. Ronder from where she lay in a pool of her own blood and carried her away to the safety of one of the vans.
“Coward! Coward! Coward!” she cried out over and over again, through lips that were just about the only part of her face left intact.
The cage door locked itself as it closed, which was a good thing, since I had no idea where the key might have been. The lion was at it a moment later, all teeth and claws not more than a few inches from my face as he reached through the bars with a mind to peel me like an apple. I fell away from the beast’s prison, flat on my arse, but I was still close enough to have my face fanned by the lion’s waving paw as he stretched for me.
“Clear out of there!” shouted a small man who had been one of the first on the scene with a pole to ward off the vicious cat. He grabbed me under the arms and, despite his modest size, managed to drag me back quite capably with the force of someone who’d spent most of his life packing and unpacking circus sideshows, building muscles by helping move heavy crates from one town to the next.
“Sahara King has made a meal of poor Eugenia’s face,” he noted grimly, once we were clear, “but that was hardly enough to fill his belly. Mind he doesn’t swallow you whole next.”
The long hours till morning light unfolded slowly following the incident. One of the troop had been sent to town to fetch help. A doctor had come first to tend to Mrs. Ronder, but his assessment of her terrible wounds were dire, and her chances of survival seemed a coin toss at best. A local constable came next. He was tall and thin, with hair as yellow as the hay some of the less bloodthirsty denizens of the Wild Beast Show feasted on. His name was Edmunds, and he questioned each witness in turn - myself included - only to discover there was no one who had witnessed the commencement of the attack. None of us could tell him anything about how it happened, only what the aftermath looked like, which he was able see for himself. He left us first thing in the morning, but asked that we remain in the camp until he returned.
Everyone involved in the circus sat together at the opposite side of the camp, away from the gruesome scene, where we would not have to stare at Ronder’s brutalized body, now covered in a modest sheet that had quickly soaked red.
The small man who had saved me introduced himself as Griggs, the clown. He didn’t strike me as amusing in the slightest, but under the circumstances his lack of good humour could be excused. Everyone had seen what I had done to help contain the lion, and I was welcomed into the group as we waited for further instructions from the police. Making up fully half the body of the circus was a collection of misshapen and uncanny individuals who performed as freaks and bonus attractions whenever the paying audience had had its fill of animal acts.
“What’s to become of us now?” asked the dog-face boy, who must have only been around my age, but already had more whiskers covering him than any one razor could hope to defeat.
The living skeleton - a man so thin, you could see every bone in his body popping out from under his exposed flesh - was also profoundly concerned.
“A man’s got to eat,” he said. “And with Ronder gone, our wages go with him.”
“He was a right bastard, but he was also our bread and butter,” complained the bearded lady in a voice deep enough to shake her nes
t of long whiskers like there was an actual nest of birds flapping about inside.
The other sideshow attractions nodded in agreement. Their prospects were poor and they knew it. Their bosses, the proprietors, were finished. One was dead, the other unlikely to ever recover.
“Anyone know of another circus hiring?” asked the left-hand side of a pair of Siamese twins. They were brothers, fused at the skull, and sat side-by-side on a bench so naturally, it hardly seemed unusual at all.
“Hiring freaks, you mean,” said Leonardo, the resident strongman and acrobat. His prospects for employment elsewhere seemed, at a glance, to be rather broader.
“What do you expect us to do otherwise?” asked the right-hand brother. “Run a shop off Piccadilly?”
“There’s a thought!” said his twin on the left. “I’ll make change at the counter while you run and make deliveries.”
The show’s collection of pinheads twittered amongst themselves at the joke, though I don’t expect any of them got it. What brains they had weren’t likely to grasp humour, or anything that might qualify any of them for a job outside a display of outcasts and abnormalities.
“Put your heads together, I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” commented Leonardo unkindly. It was another joke, but the tone was so cruel, even the pinheads didn’t find it funny.
And so it went, with the discussion of a bleak future going round and round, and nobody arriving at a solution as to what could be done to keep the show afloat. Eventually all the voices, most of them as odd and uneven as their owners were in appearance, seemed to blend together into one long lament. Only the sound of a new voice added to the mix - firm and commanding - broke me out of my spell. It addressed me by name.
“Wiggins? Whatever on earth are you doing here?”
I looked up and saw that Constable Edmunds had returned with a companion. It was a man I knew at once, and it was with no small measure of relief that I lay my eyes upon Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
“I wanted to see the circus,” I told him by way of explanation.
“He very nearly had himself a good view from inside a lion’s stomach,” added Griggs. “That one’s a killer beast to be sure. One man dead, savaged. And his wife, poor thing, mauled so badly I’ll never get the sight of her out my mind again. It’s there every time I close my eyes, her face in ribbons from that awful thing’s teeth!”
Mr. Holmes stepped to one side to observe the lion in its cage, some distance away, behind the circle of trailers.
“I would suggest you destroy it before any more harm befalls the workers or your audience.”
“Fine for you to say, sir! But what’s a circus without a lion?” said Griggs, still hopeful that The Wild Beast Show might soldier on despite the tragedy. “You have any penned up at home you’d care to sell at a reasonable price? I thought not! Not so easy to come by for a working man, and I don’t expect any of us will be able to pop by the Sub-Saharan to round up an understudy for our star attraction anytime soon.”
“I can’t claim to know much about the great cats,” said Mr. Holmes, who I’d always assumed knew everything about everything. “Yet, I must say, this sorry specimen hardly seems up to the task of savaging two grown adults - outright killing a large man such as Mr. Ronder, used to dealing with such predators.”
Mr. Holmes had a point, as he was always apt to have. I’d seen lions in picture books before, and this one looked mangy. His ribs stuck out from under a coat that wouldn’t make a very becoming rug. I couldn’t help but feel bad for the old Tom, even though he’d just tried to make a snack of me. Other than show time, jumping through hoops, he couldn’t have had much exercise pacing back and forth in his cage. Hardly a fitting fate for a mighty king of the jungle.
“Wiggins, as you’re already here, you might assist by offering your own insights. He is,” Mr. Holmes assured the policeman, “acquainted with my methods.”
“As you wish, Mr. Holmes,” said Edmunds, deferring to the council of the consulting detective.
The three of us stepped away from the circus folk to more closely inspect the scene of the previous night’s carnage.
“Young Edmunds of the Berkshire Constabulary caught a morning train to fetch me, once he astutely noted some of the irregularities this case presents,” said Mr. Holmes.
“It’s a case then, is it?” I asked, excited. I thought it had only been a mauling.
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Holmes. “Though truthfully, I have not been engaged by anyone. Edmunds only wished for my thoughts on the matter, and I came to make some first-hand observations that may better serve him.”
“You going to arrest the lion for murder?”
“I hardly think an animal would understand charges laid against it for following its nature.” Mr. Holmes pulled back the sticky sheet covering Ronder’s head.
“The lion seems to have pounced on him first, as soon as they opened the cage to feed it,” noted Edmunds.
“It must have landed with great force to inflict a crushing blow such as this,” observed Mr. Holmes. “Unusual for a beast of sharp claws and sharp teeth to kill in this manner, but I make no claims of being a zoologist. The animals I hunt tend to be of the human variety. At any rate, the apparent killer is already behind bars.”
“If you’re done having your look at the body,” said Edmunds, “I’ll arrange for it to be removed from the scene.”
Mr. Holmes took a closer look at Ronder’s wound.
“The skull may have been crushed by the cat’s substantial weight, but the claw marks are indeed observable. They did considerably less fatal damage than the paw itself, but they have torn through the victim’s scalp with no less ferocity. Yes, Edmunds, I have seen quite enough here. You many move the remains.”
As Edmunds attended to having Ronder carted away in the back of a wagon that had been brought up from the town, Mr. Holmes and I strolled through the camp grounds and discussed other matters less violent.
“Where’s Dr. Watson been keeping hisself?” I asked, noting the distinct absence of Mr. Holmes’s constant companion.
“Ha!” exclaimed Mr. Holmes, though I heard not a pinch of merriment in his laugh. “Getting married.”
I took off my cap and held it solemnly to my chest.
“Poor bugger,” I declared. “Has he gone and stuck a baby in her or something?”
“No, nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Holmes. “Indeed, it’s far worse and more scandalous than that. It seems he’s fallen in love.”
“Why’d he go and do such a fool thing as that?”
“Some mysteries are beyond even me.”
“Who’s this woman what got her claws in him, then?” I asked.
“A former client,” said Mr. Holmes. “Mary Something-or-other. The details of her case are hardly worth repeating, though Watson has seen fit to collect them into another one of his journals. Quite the wrong format for any proper discussion of deductive reasoning, but he won’t be dissuaded. He is likely blinded by his fiancé’s participation in the whole affair. By the time he finishes the text, it will doubtless read as a romance!”
“Mr. Holmes, would you like me to round up some of the boys and convince this Mary Something-or-other to break it off with the doctor and quit town?”
I thought he might be giving the notion serious consideration for a moment, but then he said, “No, Wiggins. Watson is a free agent to do as he wishes. I will not stand in the way, even when his judgement is clouded by something as spurious as l’amour.”
“It’s just I hate to see a productive partnership go to waste like this,” I said.
“Never you mind, he’ll be back,” said Mr. Holmes, like he could see the future. “In my experience, these things never go well for long. Before too many months have passed, he will look to me and new adventures to take him away from the doldrums of
married life.”
“Well, you just let me and the boys know if you need help busting him out of that gaol when the time comes. It won’t do having a promising sleuth - doctor-by-day or not - getting hisself dragged down by some female!”
“Of that, we are in complete concordance, Wiggins.”
“So what about this lion case, then?” I asked. “Is it a case at all?”
“Not for me, regrettably,” said Mr. Holmes. “I have urgent business to attend to in London, and the facts of the matter are, at least on the surface, self-evident, with no evidence to cast addition illumination on the sequence of events. The unfortunate Mrs. Ronder is unable to speak of what she saw, and will likely remain forever silent. Her husband is dead, and the apparent culprit is, himself, incapable of bearing witness. The most probable explanation continues to be misadventure with a wild and dangerous animal. Yet there remain several questionable details, as Edmunds rightfully brought to my attention.”
“Oh?” I asked, knowing there must have been something to snatch Mr. Holmes away from London. He’s not the sort of take interest in anything so obvious as a mad beast turned man killer. There must always be something else to hook him, if only for a single morning’s time.
“How is it that Ronder’s body was discovered farther from the cage than where the lion was observed preying on his wife? Surely the escapee, dumb animal or no, would not seek to backtrack in such a manner. How was it that the man’s screams persisted, even after suffering an initial wound that was almost certainly instantly fatal? And who was it that the wife was accusing of cowardice? Had her husband let her down in some key way? Surely his failure to come to her rescue could be excused by the fact that he was attacked first and left dead or dying in those initial moments of mayhem.”