Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

  “‘That,’ sputtered Twillicker, as they climbed the stairs to the Texas night, ‘that thing was going to eat me!’

  “‘Not likely,’ said his host. ‘The Cyclops likes lamb better than man. But still — better he didn’t get hold of either of us. Because that eye — that eye of his is a hungry eye.’

  “‘What do you mean by that?’

  “‘What I say. It’s a big eye — a God’s eye — and it hungers for the sight of a man’s soul. It’ll drink that sight right out of you, if you let it.’

  “Twillicker spent another three days at the ranch — thinking mostly about what that meant. He didn’t know about getting his soul drunk up — but he surely wanted to see that Cyclops again. He wanted to see him something fierce; it took all his will not to steal down that hole again, and look at the beast once more. How many times, he wondered, could he haul a rube back and back again to see this beast, if it had such a draw on a seasoned ringmaster as Twillicker?

  “He came back a month later with the right cash and equipment for moving the creature. By March, he had a rail car rigged up and fresh signs made. By the middle of April, the circus was on the move again, and Nature’s Abominations was back in business.

  “There were practical problems. For one thing, the Cyclops was not a professional. It was more like keeping an animal than an employee — as they discovered when our roustabouts tried to use the Cyclops’s strength to haul up the big top outside Denver and three of them wound up in bandages and splints, raving for days from their trials at the Cyclops’s hands. The creature’s unruliness kept him out of the Big Top as well. He couldn’t be trusted around townies without thick bars between he and them, because unlike our old geek Larouche, depravity was no act for the Cyclops. He leered — at everyone, in a measure, but he paid particular attention to the aerialists. One time — ” here Clayton paused, and patted Clarissa on the shoulder “ — one time he got hold of this girl here. Didn’t he darling?”

  Clarissa’s eyes rolled into her head and she trembled for an instant. Then she blinked and nodded.

  “Took five of us to get her back,” he said. “Clarissa tore a ligament, and that was it for her on the trapeze. Looked at her for a little long — maybe drunk a bit much of her poor wee soul, hey, girl? And she hasn’t been the same since.

  “But for that, no one could deny that with the addition of the Cyclops to our roster, the Twillicker and Baine Circus had turned a corner. Every town we stopped opened its purse to us and our monster. Rubes loved Hall of Nature’s Abominations now that the Cyclops sat in its middle. They forgave the two-headed ewe that floated nearly invisible in a milky brine. They didn’t mind that the geek cage was still empty, or that the two Italians who played the Siamese twins didn’t even look like relations. They hurried past Gerta the Doll Woman and Lois the Chicken Lady. Didn’t heed the resentful glare that our own Wotun the Magnificent gave them, as they sat through his Nine Feats of Strength that raised sweat-beads big as dimes on shoulders and a brow that had one time seemed immense. They each paid their nickels, and gathered in five-dollar crowds in the Hall’s middle for the headline of our show — and listened, as Twillicker himself rolled the spiel outside the curtained-off cage of Polyphemus, Son of Poseidon.

  “‘He has seen the Trojan women and sung duets with Sirens and walked the sea bottom at the heel of Poseidon,’ Twillicker would bellow. ‘He has fought Ulysses, battled Odysseus, and shook a fist at great Jove himself! Ladies and gentlemen — I give you — ’

  “And their breath would suck in, as the bright red curtains drew from the front of a tall, steel-barred cage.

  “‘ — I give you Polyphemus! Son of the Sea God Poseidon!’

  “And the curtain would open, and the men would gasp, and the children scream — and the women, some of them, would faint dead away at the sight of the naked giant Polyphemus. His lips would pull back from a shark’s-row of teeth, and his great arms would rise to rattle the bars of his bolted-together cage — and he’d take a taste of them with that eye of his.

  “And then, as fast as it’d risen, the red curtain would fall back in place, and the next crowd would come through. By the time the circus was ready to pull up, all the crowds were filled with familiar faces. They all felt the same draw Twillicker had felt that first night. By the time the circus left a town, the coffers were filled to overflowing with fresh torrents of silver.

  “The Cyclops became a part of the circus like he’d always been there. The cat wranglers and elephant handlers and the roustabouts had all worked out a drill for moving him, from his cage to the railcar and back again — figured out how to feed him without getting too close to those giant hands, those lethal jaws — and devised a way to wrap the ropes and chains around his wrists and ankles and middle, so he couldn’t squirm much. Charlie Baine looked at his books, and understood that for all the food he was buying for his Cyclops, profits were still higher than they’d ever been. As for the freaks, now relegated to second-class oddities in the shadow of Polyphemus? They rattled the change in their pockets and shrugged. Even Wotun couldn’t complain much, about being upstaged by the Greek giant. It was as good as pitching the tent next to the Grand Canyon. Folks’d pay to watch your show, just because it was on their way to the view.

  “And the view,” said Clayton, “doesn’t ask for a cut of the nut.”

  “But the Cyclops wasn’t just a view,” said James. “The Cyclops felt differently.”

  Clayton winked at him. “No fooling you, sir. ’Tis true. The Cyclops felt differently. And why wouldn’t he? For we kept him like an animal, although he was a thinking beast. He stood in his cage, listening to Twillicker holler his spiel, enduring the stares of the glassy-eyed rubes. Submitted to the will of his wranglers. And always he watched. With that great eye he has. He watched and he paid attention. Listened to what Twillicker said, and made out the words. Listened to the rubes muttering amongst themselves. Heard the wranglers and the freaks and the clowns chatter on. Two weeks and a day before the tragedy here — ” he gestured behind him to the camp “ — he spoke.”

  Clarissa the Oracle stood, her eyelids trembling in a sideshow trance. “I am Polyphemus,” she said in a deepened voice. “Son of the Sea God Poseidon.”

  “Dear Clarissa started talking then, too. She’d given up the trapeze, and been fooling with tea leaves and Tarot cards instead. We thought she might open a fortune-telling booth. When the words started to come — the poetry — it dawned on us all that little Clarissa should start calling herself the Oracle.”

  “From the Greek stories,” said Clarissa.

  “It was a theme,” said Clayton. “The Cyclops didn’t speak much. But the words he did speak commanded respect. He seemed to speak the things in a man’s soul. The things that did not wish speaking. Perhaps — perhaps he did what Twillicker’s Texan host said he did: drank in the souls of men and women through his great eye, and spat up truth. For is it not true that the Cyclops were the sons of Gods?”

  “The sea god Poseidon,” said James dryly.

  “You mock,” said Clayton. “But you shouldn’t, because you’ve seen him.”

  James couldn’t argue with that.

  “The talk continued off and on,” said Clayton. “Sometimes it would be just a few words a day. Words we could understand. Words in strange tongues. All mixed up. It was a kind of parroting. After a time, the talk became incessant. He talked as the wranglers tore down his cage, roped his wrists and led him to his rail car. It went on even after he was chained in, we all boarded, and the train was underway. Talked and talked and talked through the night, louder even than the engine whistle sometimes — softer than a whisper in your ear at others. Far into the next night, and into the mountains — the giant’s voice lived in our skulls. That can be the only thing that drove Twillicker to do what he finally did.”

  James shivered as the wind shifted over the circus shanty town. In the distance, he heard a rumbling sound of car engines. “And what,” he said, goose
flesh rising on his arms, “did Mister Twillicker finally do?”

  “Unbound him,” said Clayton. “They found Twillicker’s body near to the Cyclops’s car after the wreck. The giant killed him, we can only think — after Twillicker clicked the locks with the key we found on ’im. Perhaps the Cyclops told him something he could not ignore. Or perhaps — ”

  “ — perhaps the temptation to take a look was too strong to resist,” said James quietly.

  “Split up the middle was he, into Twillickers two,” said Clarissa helpfully. “One good, one wicked — and — ”

  She stopped. Rubbed her arms. Looked back to the road.

  “What’s wrong, deary?” said Clayton.

  “Wicked,” she said, very quietly, as the first black-draped truck crested the hill and stopped, to let its load of bat-bearing men out to the circus’s hobo town.

  “We should run.”

  “You are all trespassing. By the authority of the Chamblay Sheriff ’s Office and the owners of the North Brothers Lumber Company — on whose property you are squatting — I’m placing all of you under arrest.”

  The speaker was a thick-set man with short bristly white hair and thick brown sideburns who stood on the hood of the second truck in. He wore a suit jacket and black wool pants, tucked into rubber boots that came up near his knee. He held a long double-barrelled shotgun propped against his hip. Maybe two dozen men carrying baseball bats and wearing dark suit jackets surrounded him.

  “Don’t make trouble for yourselves.” The man lowered the megaphone and motioned down the slope with the barrel of his shotgun. His men started to move.

  James was already ankle deep in the river. Clayton and Clarissa, and a crowd of others with the circus were with him.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “Pinkertons,” said Clayton, huffing as he sloshed. “That one was here day before yesterday. There was trouble with a couple of the roustabouts.”

  Pinkertons. James shuddered. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard of the detective agency; when he was a boy, a gang of Pinkerton men ran herd on the men who worked the lumber mill. His father’s most prominent scar, a puckered pink thing that extended along his forehead up past his hairline, dated back to the first time Pinkertons came to Chamblay.

  Dating to a night . . .

  When the bedsprings screamed, and . . .

  . . . Jimmy tasted the sawdust in his mouth . . .

  There was no doubt about it. James’s feelings about Pinkertons were . . . complicated.

  The Pinkerton men moved through the camp like armed locusts. They knocked down tents and sent pots of hot water flying and splashing into cook-fires. Three of them descended on a dark-chinned roustabout and pummelled him to the ground. Two were studying James’s coupe, parked a dozen yards up-slope. Another two chased down a pair of dwarfs straggling behind the exodus to the creek, while five more waded into the waters after the fleeing mass of circus folk. At the top of the slope, their captain stuck a cigarette in his mouth as he watched it all unfold.

  “Get away from my car!” shouted James.

  “Christ,” said Clayton, a dozen steps ahead by now. “Hurry, boy. He’ll crack your skull! Run!”

  James was about to turn and do just that, when the shadow passed briefly over their head.

  The Pinkerton captain looked up. He dropped his cigarette, still unlit. The boulder crashed down in the middle of his truck — sending glass and metal flying through the air. The Pinkerton men who were following them turned and gaped at the sight.

  Clarissa screamed then.

  “Oh, Lord!” shouted Clayton, pointing at the opposite bank. James looked, and froze, creek water lapping icily at his ankles.

  The Cyclops stood there, a bronzed giant in the sunlight. He raised an arm to shield himself against the flames, then waded into the creek and bent down and reached into the water.

  James stood transfixed as the Cyclops’s muscles strained to yank a huge, river-rounded rock from the creek bed. Lids the size of window covers crinkled over his single eye and his sharp teeth bared in the sunlight as he hefted the rock to shoulder height. James swallowed and gasped as the beast straightened, the muscles rippled down his abdomen.

  “What’re you staring at? Come on, boy!” Clayton yanked James’s arm and hauled him stumbling downstream. Behind them, there was a gout of water high as a geyser as the rock crashed in the path of the five detectives who’d followed them. James ran, as best he could, through the fast-moving shallows of the Chamblay Creek. He didn’t look back when the terrifying roar sounded out across the valley; kept moving when he heard the two gunshots, and the screaming. He finally stopped with the rest of them, when they reached a small rapids in the creek.

  Clayton helped Clarissa onto a low, spray-soaked shelf of rock that split the creek. James hauled himself up, and for the first time looked back.

  The circus camp was blocked now by a low rise of trees. A black plume of smoke rose above them and into the sky. There was another scream — distant and strangled — and then Clarissa pointed and cried out: “Look!”

  A man was flying — his legs and arms wheeling as if for purchase on the air. He must have been a hundred feet up, before he started falling again. There came another roar. Clarissa covered her ears. Clayton shut his eyes against the tears. The others who were lucky enough to make it to the creek cowered in terror.

  And as for James —

  James Thorne found his hand creeping to the belt of his trousers. He pulled it away, and ran it through his hair.

  “My God,” he said unconvincingly. “The horror.”

  The camp was ruined when they returned, and the Cyclops was gone. But he’d left his mark. People were down everywhere: strong men and acrobats and clowns and roustabouts, and the hard men from the Pinkertons. Some must have been dead, because it smelled like barbecue. The beast had marked his exit with a gateway of smashed and broken trees. Clayton bent down onto his knees and clenched his good fist. Clarissa knelt beside him. The two of them wept softly.

  James stepped back from them: surveyed the place. It was a terrifying mess. Was this what the undertaker Simmons had meant when he said the circus folk wouldn’t be here for long? Had he heard tell that the North Brothers had gone and hired Pinkertons to clear out the town? James felt a little sick: if he’d been more on the ball, he might have been able to muster a warning, rather than waste these people’s time telling him tales of the Cyclops.

  The lame dwarf who’d kicked his car tire hobbled past, and pausing, glared up at him.

  “Ain’t you the movie pirate?” he said.

  “Captain Kip Blackwell,” said James. “That’s right.”

  “Well why don’t you get your fat piratey arse moving and take care of that beast? Make ’im walk the fuckin’ plank! ’Bout time someone did.”

  “I’m not a real pirate.” James held up his hands. “Look,” he said. “Not even a sword.”

  The dwarf bent down over one of the fallen detectives. “Well, fuck my arse, if this ain’t your lucky day.” He stood up, holding a baseball bat nearly as long as he was tall. He handed it to James. “Now you’ve got a choice — you can use this one — ” the dwarf pointed to the bat “ — or this one!” and James yelled as the dwarf swatted his groin.

  “Ha! Unless you want to save it for the Oracle bitch, who — hey!” The dwarf yelled, as Clayton grabbed him with his good arm and lifted him off his feet.

  “That’s enough,” said Clayton.

  “Wotun! C’mon! Fuck you! Put me down!” The dwarf’s feet pinwheeled in the air. James raised his eyebrows.

  “Wotun?”

  In one motion, Clayton set the dwarf on the ground and shrugged at James. “Not much of a strongman now, I’m afraid. We’re all put in our place. By that thing.”

  James hefted the baseball bat. He looked to the crack in the woods the Cyclops had left behind him. Back at Clayton O’Connor, the former Wotun the Magnificent.

  Clayton took off h
is bowler.

  “You want company?” he said.

  James shook his head. “No.”

  “I can tell what you mean to do,” he said. “Are you certain you dare to?”

  James felt himself smile a little. “You have no idea what I mean to do,” he said, and set off toward the edge of the trees — where the Cyclops had marked his path.

  As he tromped through the woods, James thought about his last day on the set. The last scene he’d shot before they let him go. Two of the Devil Pirates had tossed him into the Sarcophagus of Serpents — where Captain Kip would spend the next episode, while Princess Rebecca and the rest of the Monkey’s crew contrived his rescue and James Thorne contrived to bury his old Dad.

  “Jimmy!” Alice Shaw hurried to catch up to him, as he stalked away from the plywood Sarcophagus left over from last year’s King of the Mummies serial. He sighed and stopped.

  “Alice,” he said.

  She stopped in front of him, set her fists on the velvet britches that were Princess Rebecca’s single nod to disguise. “I just wanted — to offer my condolences.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Because we can all see how torn up you are. About your father’s death.”

  James frowned. “Well, it’s been a long time — ”

  Alice stepped closer to him, took his hands in hers as though they were sharing an intimacy. In a way, they were. “You know, Jimmy,” she said, “you should really learn how to act.”

  “Alice?”

  “You’d fool more people.” Alice stepped back. “Why are you even bothering to go?”

  James crossed his arms. “To bury him,” he said.

  “Something you wish you’d done long ago?”

  He sighed. “If you like, Alice.”

  She wagged a finger at him. “I know what you are, Jimmy Thorne,” she said. “The only question is: what did your horrible old father do to you to make you this way?”

  James wondered if he’d ever feel the proper things about his father’s death. He felt as though he were circling those things as he walked — getting closer to the feelings of grief and loss and everything else that went with facing a father’s death.