A Stranger Comes to Town

by Abra SW

“Not—especially.”

  “Poison,” the fortune teller mused.

  An unnatural silence descended over the crowd, broken only when the railer returned from scouting up the road. The railer’s job was to ride ahead and find the best road for the circus to take. When the road forked, he found the roads that dead-ended in a muddy bog or led away from the caravan’s destination, and he took a rail from a farmer’s fence and used it to block off those paths. He shouldn’t have been back in the middle of the day.

  “Why are you back so soon?” Dr. Janzen asked him, hoping to distract the others from their dark thoughts. Distraction was a good technique for coping with pain, whether the pain be physical or mental.

  “The head hostler told me to keep an eye out for a good spot to camp for a day or two,” the railer said. “There’s a small town in the valley up ahead that has the space and seems friendly. A nice lady offered me dinner and a place to sleep in her boarding house, for free, but I thought I should report back. Mrs. Margaret Della Rocca, her name is. She seems to be the local welcoming committee. Came right out to greet me when I rode into Seppanen Town. Won’t she be surprised to see all of us!”

  “How long of a ride is it?” the equestrienne asked. “The horses are already tired.”

  “We could make it by sunset if we pushed the pace. The horses would be able to rest for a couple of days afterward.”

  “You seem eager to get back.”

  The railer sighed. “She had buttermilk biscuits baking. They smelled delicious.”

  “A rest would do us good,” Dr. Janzen observed.

  “The horses won’t make it all the way to New York,” the equestrienne added.

  “And where better to stop than in a nice, friendly town,” the fortune teller concluded.

  ~ * ~

  Christopher Knall

  Christopher Knall straightened from his labor in the chicory field, pressed his hand to the small of his back, and leaned into a stretch. Dried sweat made his shirt crackle under his hand. Mud coated his pants. He was hardly the fine sight he’d been when he walked into town with a suitcase full of ladies’ hair combs and men’s shaving sets to sell.

  Something moved along the road in the distance. He squinted. Wagons, traveling their way. Poor bastards don’t know what they’re getting into. Can I warn them somehow?

  When the caravan got closer, the thought vanished. He gaped.

  It must be a hallucination. He’d finally cracked. The procession was led by a woman standing on top of her saddle as if that was a perfectly ordinary way to ride a horse. A freakishly thin and elongated man rode in one of the wagons behind her. A pair of miniature humans perched atop another. And the giant bone and brass thing that flanked them could only have ridden out of a nightmare.

  “Impossible,” Christopher breathed. Beside him, Francis straightened.

  Seppanen Town had caught Francis on his way to a promised job in Boston, he’d told Christopher. A stranger in town, he’d gratefully agreed to stay the night in Mrs. Della Rocca’s boarding house. He’d woken up to chains, a strict lecture on how things were going to be during the harvest, and a nourishing breakfast of steak and buttermilk biscuits. Francis wasn’t a stranger to hard labor, as his dark tan and rough hands attested. He’d showed Christopher the ropes.

  “It’s not break time yet,” Francis said now, with a quick glance at the heavily pregnant woman sitting with a shotgun across her knees. “We’d best get back to work soon, or Clara will feel she has to do something.”

  “We have a few more minutes,” Christopher said. Clara, the woman on guard duty, was not unsympathetic. She let them rest when they needed it, and she saw to it that they had enough water. She seemed almost embarrassed by the situation.

  “Although I reckon she’ll understand us stopping to look at that,” Francis continued, staring in the same direction as Christopher.

  “You can see it, too?” Christopher asked. “I thought I was hallucinating.”

  Francis laughed. “I couldn’t dream up those—those whatever-they-are!” He pointed.

  “Ostriches.” Christopher studied them as they passed. An equestrienne, a thin man, midgets, exotic animals … it’s a circus. That’s a lot of strangers. He stared after them with eyes that felt scorched dry, and he began to plan.

  Slowly-slowly, he worked his way over, a row at a time, until he was in the row right beside the woods. Francis drifted after him. “What are you up to?”

  “I’m going to run away and join the circus.”

  ~ * ~

  Dr. Christopher Janzen, the Great Doctor Panjandrum!

  It did look like a nice town, Dr. Janzen thought approvingly as they approached the outskirts. A wooden sign welcomed them to Seppanen Town, Population—blank. The number had been scraped off, though the welcome hadn’t.

  Through maple trees glowing golden-red in the light of the setting sun, he saw a fresh-cleared space with dozens of grave mounds in it. No church sat nearby, so the grave site must have been made in a hurry, but it was well-away from the town’s water supply. Each grave had a proper wooden cross at its head and a mound of rocks on top of it to keep animals from unearthing the dead. Good planning and good hygiene.

  The circus caravan rolled past a long field of dark green chicory. A scattering of summer’s flowers still shone the cobalt blue of bachelor’s buttons and Union hospital medicine bottles. Men and women walked the rows, pulling the plants and tossing them in wide woven baskets. Children worked alongside them. A heavily pregnant woman sat on a stump at the edge of the field, keeping guard with a shotgun resting on her knees. They must have had bandit trouble, too.

  One of the men working the rows straightened and stared at the circus as it passed. A youngish fellow with an open, honest sort of face, he wore clothes of a cut and cloth too fine for his labor. Everyone must work in a community this small, if they wish to survive the winter. Perhaps he was a shop assistant, before the storm.

  The young man stared after the circus with a focus Dr. Janzen found alarming. It was not the reaction of amused interest or mild disdain they usually received. That intensity put him in mind of a few of the inmates in the mental asylum he’d toured as part of his medical education. Perhaps the young man was one of those individuals who became unbalanced on the subject of moral corruption and saw the circus as the Whore of Babylon. I should warn … The thought trailed off. He would have warned the ringmaster, but that individual was beyond warning now.

  The warmth of the town’s welcome reassured him. A little girl from the chicory field darted in front of the circus and sprinted ahead to beat them into town, her sandals flapping and her pigtails bobbing as she ran. As the lead circus wagon turned onto Main Street, the little girl trotted back out of the general goods store with a lolly in her hand and a burly, balding man in a shopkeeper’s apron following behind her.

  The shopkeeper blanched a bit as wagons kept rolling down Main Street, but he recovered quickly and stepped out to greet them. “Welcome to Seppanen Town, strangers!” he called. “Just passing through?”

  At the front of the procession, the equestrienne reined her white mare to a halt. “We’re the Loyale Traveling Circus. We need to camp and rest the horses for a couple of days before proceeding on to New York. When was the last time your town had a circus visit?”

  “Ah, quite some time!” the shopkeeper managed.

  “Where would the best place for us to camp be?”

  “Why don’t you, um, fine folks come see Mrs. Della Rocca? She runs our boarding house. She likes welcoming visitors personally.” His gaze fell on the rather battered-looking roustabouts walking beside the wagons. “She was a nurse in the War, too, and she does pretty well patching us up.”

  The equestrienne looked questioningly over her shoulder at the rest of the circus folk. Nobody said aye or nay. She shrugged and then dismounted gracefully, letting the reins fall from her hand to hang loose. Her mare stood stock-still, as if she’d been anchored in the middle of the str
eet. “Thank you. I’d be delighted.”

  Dr. Janzen got down from his wagon to follow her, as did a handful of other circus folk, including the railer, the strongman, the conjoined sisters, and the roustabouts who’d been a little banged up fighting off bandits. The rest stayed close to the circus wagons, a wise practice in a strange town, even an ostensibly friendly one.

  Ginger the clown, however, walked down the block to an establishment graced by an ornately carved sign advertising “Sally’s Saloon.” Dr. Janzen shook his head disapprovingly. Every town they stopped in, the first thing the clown did was head to the saloon. If he didn’t take better care of himself, he’d die with pebbles of scar tissue scaling his alcohol-soaked liver.

  Mrs. Della Rocca seemed much more wholesome. She opened her door wearing an apron lightly dusted in flour and adorned by promisingly food-like stains.

  “Welcome!” she said. “You must be new to town! My, what an awful lot of you there are!” She tossed a questioning glance in the storekeeper’s direction.

  “A whole circus came to town,” he said quickly. “This is just a couple of them.”

  “We were hoping to find a place to camp, where we could break from traveling for a few days. Of course, we’ll perform while we’re here,” the equestrienne interjected.

  “How wonderful,” Mrs. Della Rocca said. “Where are you headed?”

  “New York.”

  “Lovely.” She caught the storekeeper’s eye. “And then they’ll all be going on to New York City,” she repeated absently. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your store?”

  “Oh. Yes’m.” He bobbed his head and ducked out.

  “Come on in,” she invited the circus folk. The equestrienne stepped over the threshold. The railer followed eagerly (no doubt hoping for buttermilk biscuits), and the others straggled after.

  Inside, Dr. Janzen sniffed. The air smelt of flour and cinnamon and cloves and—smoke?

  Mrs. Della Rocca’s eyes widened when she noticed the bruises and scrapes the roustabouts had acquired. “Oh dear, you’re hurt! Come into the kitchen where I keep my supplies. I was a nurse in the War, you know.”

  The same big strong men who’d resisted Dr. Janzen’s ministrations followed her as meekly as kittens.

  A faint scent of burning lingered in the kitchen, and a pan of scorched buttermilk biscuits sat on top of the stove beside a pan of bloody water.

  Following Dr. Janzen’s gaze, Mrs. Della Rocca laughed, though it sounded forced. “Those biscuits might go to feed the hogs, I’m afraid. The beef fared better. I don’t know how it was where you were when that unnatural storm hit, but we lost half our herds, between the ones that died outright and the ones that sickened after. We hung and cured what meat we could, but it’s still steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!”

  She gestured to an unbaked pumpkin pie sitting on her kitchen table, next to a roll of bandages. “But the pumpkins are ripe now, though we’re short hands to pick them. I am so looking forward to seeing that pumpkin pie at breakfast tomorrow. But listen to me ramble on!”

  “Pumpkin pie,” a girl’s voice murmured longingly. Dr. Janzen thought it was one of the conjoined sisters.

  He had to agree with her sentiment. He wished for more variety, too. Their dinners were getting awfully repetitive, though Cook grumbled so much about the lack of supplies that nobody dared complain—which was no doubt the point.

  ~ * ~

  Ginger, the Whitefaced Clown

  Seppanen Town, Connecticut

  “I’ll have a blackstrap, please,” Ginger said, leaning against the bar. Behind him, the door swung open and the burly storekeeper who’d welcomed the circus into town came in and sat down in a corner. Odd. The sun wasn’t down yet; there was still business to be done.

  The curly-haired woman behind the bar lifted down a bottle of rum and a jar of molasses and began mixing the drink. “Military man, are you? Sailor?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Some men get a taste for the rum.”

  Ginger smiled pleasantly. “I just have a taste for molasses. So, are you Sally?”

  The bartender chuckled. “There is no Sally. The saloon’s owned by Miss Lindsay Kleinman. She decided folks would think it sounded more welcoming than ‘Lindsay’s Liquors.’ My name’s Cathy Williamson. I’m watching the place for her while she’s otherwise occupied.”

  Miss Williamson didn’t specify what the owner was occupied with, Ginger noted but did not comment on. “What do I owe you?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about it!” Miss Williamson said jovially. “Strangers drink free.” She smiled. “This town couldn’t make it without you.”

  “Don’t bother,” the storekeeper spoke up, from his table in the corner. “He’s with the circus. They’ll all be leaving town soon enough.”

  At that news, Miss Williamson lost some of her cheer and all of her loquaciousness. When Ginger ordered another drink, she said gruffly, “That’ll be twenty-five cents.”

  Ginger tried asking general questions about Seppanen Town, but all he could finagle out of her were monosyllabic answers.

  He swiveled on the bar stool, looking over the few men in the saloon. “Next round’s on me!” he said.

  They all avoided his eye, even the two playing a game of poker. That was truly odd. A man buying drinks should be everybody’s friend, and he’d never known a poker game that didn’t welcome a stranger who was free with his money.

  Ginger decided he didn’t want to have his back to the crowd or the bartender, so he smiled pleasantly, took his drink, and sat down at a table near the door. He put his hand in his right pocket. He had slit the pocket’s bottom open long ago, to allow easy access to the hideaway pistol he kept strapped to his thigh. He kept his back to the wall and finished his drink by the simple expedient of spilling most of it on the floor when nobody was watching.

  Despite his sense that something was amiss, he finished his drink and left in peace. He returned to the circus caravan a few minutes before the other explorers came back from their meeting with the town greeter. The railer looked unhappy: no buttermilk biscuits had been forthcoming, then.

  “We have directions to a camp site,” the equestrienne announced. She led them through town and took the left-hand fork after they passed an apple orchard on the outskirts. They reached an empty field just as the sun set. “This field is fallow and the farmer is dead,” she said, “so we don’t need to worry about trampling any crops.”

  ~ * ~

  Christopher Knall

  “You’re cracked!” Francis hissed. “Do you know what they’ll do to you when they catch you?”

  Christopher tensed his shoulders. “Well enough. I won’t get caught. I know where I’m going. Come with me! We can both escape.”

  “Clara will get in trouble.”

  Christopher stared at Francis. “She’ll be fine. She’s one of their own.”

  “And if the circus won’t hide you?”

  “Come with me!”

  Francis shook his head. “No. This isn’t so bad for me, really.” He turned up work-calloused palms. “I’m used to it. And winter’s coming on. Here at least I know I’ll get food and a place to stay. Out there—what if it’s the same everywhere? You think they’ll treat us better?”

  Christopher hissed through his teeth in frustration. “I’ll come back for you if it’s safe. Don’t tell them where I went.”

  Francis nodded and eased back away through the rows, so that by the time twilight let down her hair to hide the forest in deepening shadow, he was working quite far away from Christopher. Christopher braced to bolt into the woods. Soon, Clara would push herself awkwardly up from her seat on the tree stump and say—

  “That’s it for the day,” she called. “Take your baskets and move to the road.”

  Christopher sprinted into the woods. He made no attempt at sneaking away. Speed and darkness are my only allies. He blundered through the woods like a wounded boar. And maybe Clara’s soft
heart. He paused and listened, his back muscles tensing in anticipation of pain, but she didn’t fire the shotgun after him. Branches snapped underfoot and snagged and tore his clothes. Clara wouldn’t chase after him, not burdened as she was. Since she hadn’t shot him already, he figured he had until she got back to town to get a head start. Then they’d send serious men with dogs and lanterns after him.

  Dogs. He veered to run in the direction of the stream that was the town’s water supply. They might expect that, but it could still help hide his scent. Cold air stung his skin. His breath rasped in and out of his lungs.

  The townsfolk would expect him to go upstream, away from the town, so he’d go down instead. That was his best shot for finding the circus, too. It was dark. They would need to camp. They’d want to get through town first, to make sure they wouldn’t have an unfriendly welcome. Always check out your surroundings before you camp for the night, that was a basic rule of traveling folk. He guessed he’d failed that one.

  He crested a hill. Through the trees, he saw the glimmer of water in the moonlight. He ran in that direction.

  Something heavy smacked him across the face so hard that he fell down, stunned. He lay there expecting to be seized, but nothing happened. The only sound was the rustle of leaves in the breeze and the faint gurgle of water. A branch. He’d run into a tree branch. He pushed himself up and ran again. No time to go more carefully.

  He plunged into the stream. Water rose over his shoes and soaked his socks. He splashed downstream with no care for the noise. His foot slipped on a slimy river rock. He lurched off-balance for a moment, tottered, then straightened and waded on. He spared a moment to thank God that his captors were too inexperienced to take away his shoes.

  When he saw lantern light ahead, he slowed, placing his feet with care and trying not to splash too loudly. Seppanen Town’s lit windows glowed yellow against the gloaming twilight. That glow promised warmth and comfort and safety, and he hated it for the lie.

  The cold water numbed his feet and made him clumsy. Exhaustion slowed his reactions. The adrenaline was fading, leaving his thoughts slow as treacle.