“Why would you do that, man?” Victor asked, his brow furrowed. “That’s seriously disturbed.”
“Of course, there’s always the possibility that the fact you’re one of Kitty’s lovers will work in your favor, and I’d cure you exactly how you wanted me to,” Bell said. “If you think I’d tell you which path I’m more likely to take, that would be cheating.”
“Hypothetically speaking, what’s the worst thing you could do?” Victor asked.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you think would be the worst thing for me to do,” Bell answered.
“Now that’s cheating,” Victor said.
“No, it was a bad question.”
“You know what I meant.”
“What you meant is irrelevant. What you said was unclear,” Bell replied.
Victor hesitated in the midst of the argument, tightening his jaw.
Bell wasn’t just being an ass for the sake of being an ass. He was making a point. For most people, language was a form of communication bolstered by understood elements like context and history as well as nonverbal signals and cues. For Bell, language was a playground.
“Hypothetically speaking, you could kill me if I asked you to cure me?” Victor asked more carefully.
“Death is the final cure, friend,” Bell said.
Victor took a deep breath, nodding, finally understanding the game. “What ways could you cure me by not killing me?”
“I could remove your illness and replace it with another that has a worse prognosis—or give you something with which you’d have to live a long and miserable life.”
“But why would you do that?” Victor asked. “Why would you do such a monstrous thing to a person?”
“Because I can,” Bell replied, no sign on his face that there was anything wrong with the things that he did.
Victor slammed his hand on the table.
Kitty flinched. That one she hadn’t expected.
“I… No. I can’t do this,” Victor said, getting to his feet and stalking out of the tent.
Kitty started to get up, but Bell motioned for her to wait. She settled back down, staring at her hands, almost prim with her spine straight and stiff against the back of the chair.
The tent flap swept up and Victor ducked in again. “Hypothetically speaking—” His words caught when he realized that neither Kitty nor Bell had moved, expecting him back. But he resumed without stammering, “If I were to wish to become a part of the circus on the condition that you take my illness away, would you do one of those things to manipulate my wish into something I didn’t intend?”
“Under most circumstances, Victor, I wouldn’t give you a straight answer. Then again, not many people enter Arcanium with full foreknowledge.” Bell turned his gaze to her. Kitty couldn’t see it, but she felt it. He knew she’d never approved of how he introduced people to the other side of Arcanium. “I’ll give you this gift. No, I would not manipulate your wish. Consider it a signing bonus. But there would be sacrifice.”
“Like what?” Victor asked.
“The same sacrifices every man makes when he joins Arcanium,” Bell said. “It means leaving everything behind. In your case, it would mean everyone thinking you were dead—your friends, your family, even long-distance acquaintances. I can’t have your remission bringing busload after busload of people here for miracles. I’m not a faith healer. That’s not what Arcanium is for. It’s sometimes a fortunate side effect, but I think Kitty is in agreement with me that I am not the one to whom people should come to be cured. It would get messy very quickly.”
“I can imagine,” Victor said. He lowered himself onto his chair. His hand shook a little when he placed it on his lap. “And hypothetically speaking, if I were to join Arcanium, what would I be doing for you?”
“I have an oddity in mind,” Bell said. “I’m much more generous in the granting of my wishes with voluntaries than I am with those who make a wish that irks me or who irk me all on their own. It will not be something that limits you more than your disease already limits you. And if you had any interest, we could find a place in the tumbling acts for you as well.”
“I don’t know how to do any of that,” Victor said.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Bell replied with a slight curve of his lip.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Victor repeated under his breath. He rested his elbow on the table and rubbed his forehead against a growing headache. “I can’t believe I’m actually considering this is real. That I’m actually considering this.”
“Of course, Mr. Lazlo,” Bell said with a bow as he stood, “it’s all hypothetical.”
Chapter Three
After they’d left Bell’s tent, Kitty led Victor to the picnic tables near the food booths.
“You want a beer?” Kitty asked.
“Do they let you serve beer before noon?” Victor asked.
“They don’t let us sell beer. You can have it if you don’t buy it, though. That’s your right as a legal adult making his own bad decisions,” Kitty said.
Victor laughed, because there was nothing else to do. “Sure.”
Kitty went to one of the food booths and asked the crew working there for two beers.
“You’re not the only one who can make bad decisions,” she said by way of explanation, as she handed Victor his.
He opened it with his shirt, took a few swift swallows and made a face.
“I like darker beers,” he said.
“I like the pumpkin beer.” She sat down next to him, leaning back with her elbows on the table like his.
“You’re one of those pumpkin fiends, aren’t you?”
“All hail the Great Pumpkin,” Kitty said.
“You said you make bad decisions. Is this place one of them?” Victor asked. He didn’t look at her when he asked. He kept his eyes trained on the midway crew getting ready to open in a few hours.
“I told you this was home,” she replied.
“Doesn’t mean it’s not a bad decision.”
“There are decisions I’ve made here that are bad. Long as I’ve been here, it’d be weirder if I didn’t. But being here isn’t one of those bad decisions,” Kitty said. “It’s a complicated decision. It’s a complicated place. I don’t regret joining.”
“Even if your boss is an impotent little imp, playing with people the way he does?” Victor said.
Kitty smiled. “He’d be amused by being called ‘impotent’.”
“Only an impotent jackass would play with people’s wishes like that,” Victor said.
“I’ve never seen him more upfront about how he’d handle a wish,” Kitty said. “You were very fortunate.”
“That was him being straightforward?” Victor asked incredulously.
Kitty couldn’t help the stream of giggles that escaped her. “Sorry. Yes. He was practically kind. This is one of those times that the difference between a human and a jinni is a significant one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know how this is going to sound, believe me. It’s going to sound like a crapton of rationalization and justification with a generous helping of Stockholm syndrome. I’ve heard it all,” Kitty said. “Arcanium is about half demon, half human. Not all of the humans are here of their own free will. The ones that are, most of them didn’t know exactly what Arcanium was until they were already a part of it. You think Bell told me before he had me wish myself in? All I knew was I needed to join a freak show, and Arcanium was a damn good one. As far as I know, if you decide to join, you’d be the only human being who knew about the whole demon thing. You’d be making the most informed choice of any of us.
“But before you start going off on me and the other humans here on purpose or who chose to join on a voluntary basis after being trapped in it…the only demons allowed to do anything to us are the Ringmaster and Bell himself, and Bell will mostly just play with your wishes and instruct you how to contribu
te to his circus. He’s more interested in seeing what the little insects end up doing than in squashing them or burning them up with a magnifying glass. In fact, he fiercely protects us. The only other reason why anyone could hurt you here in Arcanium is if you break one of the cardinal rules, and that gets the Ringmaster involved.”
“So Bell is the pimp, the Ringmaster is the enforcer and you all just go along with it?” Victor said.
“That’s one way to look at it,” Kitty said mildly. She wasn’t going to change anyone’s perspective, and she didn’t want to waste her afternoon trying to talk him out of it. He had to change it on his own.
“You say Bell protects you.” Victor downed the rest of his beer. “Sounds like he and the Ringmaster are the ones you need protection from.”
“Oh, believe me, Bell granting wishes is the worst part for some people. But you only get three wishes, so you know there’s a point when he can’t play around with you anymore. He protects us from the other demons. And he protects the demons from us. We’re expected to live in relative harmony.”
She finished her own beer and set it down on the table so that she could rest her hand on Victor’s shoulder.
“You just have to remember that demons aren’t human. They can look human if they want—even the ones who choose to look strange for the circus—and that makes it harder to remember that they aren’t human. We try to force the demons into a human box. It won’t work. They disappoint you every time. But if you remember that they’re aggressive toward humans by nature, built to tempt us or compelled to harm us, like carnivorous plants to flies, then you’re better able to appreciate that this place could be so much worse.”
Victor snorted, but he smiled a little. “That’s your argument to get me in here? It could be worse?”
“Well, couldn’t it?” Kitty said.
He opened his mouth to reply then abruptly shut it again. His face went expressionless, stricken.
Kitty was thinking of a hospital—bed sores, the beeping of monitors, the smell of cleaning chemicals, morphine, waiting, X-ing out the days, other people’s tears. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing.
“Why don’t you stick around this afternoon?” Kitty said. “I have to do some contractual sitting in my tent, but the rest of the time I’m allowed to wander about. And you can do your own exploring without me around, no pressure. Tonight, I’ll have to manage some of their hair, but I can get Valorie to take over any other catastrophes that might come up so I can join you during the performance. Gosh, it might be the first performance I’ve attended from the audience in about seven years.”
“Sure,” Victor said. Without a beer to hold onto, he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. “But only because I was planning on coming today anyway.”
“When the customers start coming in and you’re done with whatever lunch you want, stop by my tent. It’s in the middle of Oddity Row,” Kitty said. “I already told the staff in those two booths to give you whatever you ask for. You get employee benefits today.”
“All you eat is fair food? Why are you all not fat?” Victor asked.
“It’s not all bad, plus we don’t have it all the time. We stop by grocery stores when we’re traveling, and we have fridges in our trailers. I also have one in my tent. But we don’t get fat for the same reason we don’t age,” Kitty said. “Bell keeps us pretty much the same, physically. The tumblers and other skilled performers are given the physique they need. Since I’m not one of them, I could probably gain or lose weight if I wanted to, but with the exception of Arnie, we don’t really fluctuate one way or the other.”
“Who’s Arnie?”
“Our Fat Man. But he hasn’t fluctuated lately either,” Kitty said.
“He didn’t used to be fat, did he?”
“No.”
“That’s sick,” Victor said.
“Seems that way, doesn’t it?” Kitty said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that everything in Arcanium isn’t what it appears to be. I’ll give you the short versions when I introduce you to the rest of the cast, but for now I need to change, fix my hair, fix other people’s hair and temper the rumor mill.”
“I get it. You go do your job,” Victor said, waving his hand in the general direction of the big top. He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment then added, “You really like your job, don’t you? I mean, it’s one thing for Arcanium to be your home, but I remember meeting you for the first time. You would talk about it with this…glow on your face whenever we’d meet. And on the way in… You don’t just do your job. You love it.”
“It has its not-so-great moments, but yes,” Kitty said. “Even the people who are miserable, they find their joy here. That’s the only way to survive it. But it’s not all doom and gloom, or else there would be no joy, would there?”
She left him with that conundrum. She thought today was a corset kind of day. Copper, to set off her hair and to go with the pumpkin ciders and beers. She grabbed another one from the food booth to keep in her fridge until the Arcanium gates opened for business.
* * * *
Of the few people with whom she’d shared the more supernatural side of her work, Victor was the only one who’d stuck around this long. At this rate, Bell might not even have to blur his memory of the incident. He’d know too much to be taken seriously. Who would believe him?
However, Victor didn’t seem like the kind of man who would just share information like this to anyone and sundry.
And there he was, right in front of her tent.
Even though Kitty tried to tell herself this was all purely business, not personal, there was still a place in her chest that ached seeing him in the midst of the early afternoon crowd, staring into her eyes while the rest of them stared at her body.
He’d stuck around.
She smiled at her small audience and whipped out a placard from behind her chair.
If you would like to meet Pretty Kitty, the Bearded Lady of Arcanium, she’s not in her tent at the moment. She’s walking around the circus or the other events and would be delighted to take pictures with you or answer any questions.
She waved to the people. Many of them smiled and waved back, like children, in wide-eyed wonder that she wasn’t just an animatronic doll. A few of them put singles and coins into her tip jar, just for being real.
Then Kitty swept into the back of her tent.
She met Victor at the table next to her tent where some of the crew sold her persona’s merchandise. She wasn’t vain, but she had a Pretty Kitty keychain for her RV key. They’d only been selling oddity accessories for the last six or seven years. She kind of liked them. Okay, she really liked them. She had one of Valorie’s keychains as well and lockets of Maya and Lady Sasha.
Victor wrapped an arm around her waist and brought her hips against his to kiss the corner of her mouth. Once again, Kitty had that flutter in her stomach that she mostly associated with her teenage years, every time a boy hadn’t treated her like pond scum for having a five o’clock shadow or a stray hair on her hand that she’d missed. Some people in the area around her tent actually clapped. It was okay for an oddity to get love on Oddity Row. Then it wasn’t weird—it was cute, part of the entertainment.
She’d rather have the favorable response than the negative, no matter how cynical she could get about the why.
“So I’ve decided you’re not evil,” he murmured in her ear. “Or Eve.” The curve of his lips showed that he was partly kidding.
“Eve and Adam were ignorant,” Kitty said.
“Exactly,” Victor replied.
“Have you gotten past Stockholm syndrome yet?” she asked as she led him outside Oddity Row to start him at the beginning.
“Not quite.”
“I appreciate the honesty.”
“I know you do,” he said.
“Have you done much exploring?” Kitty asked.
“It’s smaller than I remember,” Vi
ctor said.
“I think it’s the same thing as when books and movies seem shorter the second time around,” Kitty said. “We’ve actually expanded a bit, although we’ll never get too big. And Bell’s planning to put in a haunted funhouse soon.”
“The question is why he didn’t put one in sooner,” Victor said. “Sounds like it’s right up his alley.”
“I’m afraid to ask,” Kitty replied. “You want to play a game?”
“You mean the midway?” Victor asked. “Already been there. Everything’s rigged. I already tried. I got you a zombie teddy bear, though.”
Kitty bit back a laugh. “How thoughtful. No, I was more thinking ‘demon, voluntary or involuntary’.”
“What’s my prize if I get most of them right?” Victor asked.
“I’m pretty sure you won’t.”
“Challenge accepted.”
“You get a kiss,” Kitty said.
“Challenge even more accepted. Why do kisses always taste sweeter in theme parks?”
Kitty knew the answer to that one, but she kept it to herself. After all, it would give away part of the game. What she also didn’t tell him was that if he lost, the prize for her was the same, so everyone won either way.
It was a good sign that he was taking all this so lightly. Maybe that was just the only way he could handle it. Maybe he still didn’t believe.
Maybe this was just the eye of the storm.
Kitty could handle storms. She’d done so before, and she’d probably weather a lot more before her time in Arcanium was through.
“Demon, voluntary or involuntary?” she asked. “I’ve already given you a few of them, so those should be easy points.”
They stopped at the first oddity tent, where the Lizard Man was engaged in an audience-favorite trick of throwing frozen mice in the air, catching them and eating them whole. Sometimes Arcanium got animal rights’ activists on their butts for it, but if they decided to trespass or attack, the circus didn’t have them around for long. Besides, the mice had been frozen for the purpose of consumption by reptilian-type things. Bale was no exception.
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