Sideshow

by William Ollie

  Bo eased off the brake and left Marvin and his crew behind. The car rolled forward, and once again Justin found himself wondering why all of this had happened, why he and Mickey Reardon had to be part of it. They should’ve been eating pizza at Mickey’s house tonight, asleep in their beds by now, not pulling to a stop in the middle of the night in an overgrown field, sitting in the dark beside Jack Everett’s sleek new Caddy.

  The car stopped and Bo killed the engine, the headlights fading away as he turned to Reardon. “Well,’ he said. “This is it.”

  “We really going down there?” Justin said.

  “I am,” Bo said, and Reardon said, “Damn straight I am.”

  He grabbed Rusty Piersol’s revolver, and then nudged the shotgun over to Bo Johnson, who grabbed it, and said, “Huh, guess you’ve got some balls down there after all, Reardon.”

  Bo opened his door and slid the shotgun across his lap, pausing a moment, before saying, “Three tents down there, old man’s gotta be in one of ‘em.”

  Then he was out the door and into the night, slamming the door shut and heading down through the cars, the trucks and jalopies, his pump-action shotgun close by his side.

  “You ready, Justin?” Reardon said.

  “I reckon.”

  “You don’t have to come, you know. You can wait for me here.”

  “If you’re going, I’m going, dude. That’s the way it works.”

  “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

  Reardon opened his door and so did Justin. They got out of the car and slammed their doors shut, Reardon with Rusty Piersol’s service revolver in his hand, Justin carrying Mickey Reardon’s ax. They were by the front of Jack Everett’s Caddy, when Justin said, “Why do you think it’s changed? Why do you think we can see this place as it really is now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because the night’s almost over with. Maybe his powers have dwindled a bit. I don’t really give a shit. I’m not some comic book hero here to battle his ass. I’m gonna find my mom and get her the hell outa here, hopefully without even running into that long, tall son of a bitch.”

  “I heard that,” Justin said, then, “Where’re we going first?”

  “She wasn’t in the Sideshow tent. We’ll check the other two.”

  “Ears wasn’t in the Sideshow tent, either. I bet he is, now.”

  “You just had to say that, didn’t you?”

  “Sorry, man. I just… maybe we should check all three of ‘em.”

  “We will if we have to.”

  Further down the field now, Justin was glad to see the carnival’s entrance unattended. No Hannibal Cobb, no smiling clown, nor even a snarling one. Maybe they’d get out of here without running into him after all, though Justin wouldn’t have bet on it, not with the way their luck had been running tonight.

  They stepped through the entrance, onto a midway much smaller, much more narrow than the one they had run laughing and giggling over earlier in the night. Smaller and slimmer, perhaps, but much easier to negotiate now that Cindi Stewart and all the other imaginary carnival goers weren’t around to impede their progress.

  There wasn’t anything imaginary about the people populating Godby’s field now, though. Just like Marvin Jones had told them, half the rednecks in Pottsboro, South Carolina were running through the place, and a good many from areas just outside of town. Twenty or more people were moving about Hannibal Cobb’s midway, and no telling how many more were in the tents. There was Ronnie Nelson’s dad, Billy; Fred Hagen and his crazy old grandfather walking right behind him. Ritchie Scovul and Jerry McCrea, and all three of the Purvis brothers, who were standing in a circle around Jim Kreigle, watching him spin round and round in place in the middle of them.

  They walked down the midway, past the Sideshow tent with Danny Roebuck’s gigantic ears emblazoned on its side, Justin looking up to see if any more changes had been made, fearful he might see Tricia Reardon’s smiling face in place of The Rubber Woman, or worse, her head plastered atop the body of that gigantic fat lady. But nothing had changed, and they continued unencumbered on their way, Reardon’s pistol visible in his hand, Justin still carrying the ax. On their way, Justin realized, to a tent whose flapping banner read: Girls! Girls! Girls!

  They were several yards away when Justin noticed Hannibal Cobb’s lanky frame lurking in the entrance, his long grey hair falling over the shoulders of his black coat; his back turned to them as he watched whatever was going on inside the tent. Music was flowing from the tent, the old bump and grind it out stripper music Justin had heard countless times on television shows and movies.

  He reached out to stop Reardon, but Reardon had already stopped.

  “You see him?” Justin said, and then realized his friend was looking not at Hannibal Cobb, but at a life-sized caricature of his mother emblazoned on the side of the tent. Dressed in a skimpy black bra, thong underwear and a pair of spiked high heel shoes, she smiled down at the midway as if a stripper’s life was the only one she’d ever known. Her face, garishly made up, was not the warm and friendly face of the woman Justin had known for most of his life, but a carbon copy of the one on the opposite side of the tent’s entrance point.

  “C’mon,” he said, grabbing Reardon before he had a chance to rush in through the entrance. He led him around the side of the tent, where the two of them went down and under, eventually emerging in a room so dark and dim, Justin found himself looking around to see where the torches were. But, of course, there were no torches. Just as nothing had been powering the Ferris wheel earlier tonight, or lighting up the Sideshow tent, nothing seemed to be casting light about the place they now stood in.

  They stood in a dim glow, emanating from God only knew where—or Hannibal Cobb, Justin realized—Justin looking on in horror as Tricia Reardon moved around a high wooden stage with nothing covering her but a thin, black thong. Her eyes were closed, one flattened hand slipped down beneath the front of her thong, the other rubbing one of her breasts, as the music played and she danced nearly completely naked for half the rednecks of Pottsboro, South Carolina.

  Mickey raised his pistol, and Justin said, “Don’t. He’ll come right after us, and we’ll never get her back.”

  He lowered his weapon and Tricia Reardon’s eyes popped open. She danced to the edge of the stage and looked out across the crowd. Then her eyes found two young boys at the back of the tent and she stopped. She stood there, recognition flooding over her as the music played and the crowd yelled for more, and Hannibal Cobb watched everything unfold: Tricia Reardon mouthing, “Oh, my, God.” Turning and running backstage as the crowd hooted like owls, and Justin and Mickey scrambled down to the ground and back out the same way they had entered.

  She ran through the curtains screaming and crying, howling her anguish as she scrambled off the stage and onto the wooden planks, over the planks and into a dark void at the rear of the tent, one that had been waiting for her since the very moment she’d plunged that knife into her husband’s chest. A dark and empty void that swallowed her whole and disappeared in a flash of light and a puff of smoke, leaving the cold, cruel world behind her, while Justin and Mickey ran into the tent and up the back steps to the top of the platform.

  “Where’d she go?” Mickey said.

  “I don’t know,” said Justin, as a shotgun blast roared through the night and the platform trembled, and all hell began to break loose.

  Chapter Thirty

  They hurried down the stairs, the very earth moving beneath their feet as they ran out of the tent and into the night, around to the midway, where Hannibal Cobb stood in the center of Godby’s field, his head thrown back, those long, thin arms of his cast up toward the sky as his fingers wriggled beneath the waning moon.

  “Come!” he cried out. “Come, my children! Your wait is finally over!”

  The earth churned and hands began to rise from it, to claw and scrape until arms were visible, the shoulders and heads of those buried down through the ages, by evil men who had settle
d this land with anger and rage, rape and murder and iron and chains.

  The earth churned and Bo Johnson came charging around the corner, blasting holes through the chest of an old black man who didn’t seem to care, didn’t seem to even notice the pellets ripping through him as he lumbered up the midway. The tattered bib coveralls he wore hung off him like moldering rags, as did the shredded bits of skin that halfway covered his bones, and Justin instinctively knew he had seen this man before, not lumbering up the midway of Hannibal Cobb’s Kansas City Carnival, but standing in the entrance with a smile on his face and a clown’s suit covering his body. He was impossibly thin; his eyes were wide. His cheekbones, which gleamed in the moonlight through his ragged black skin, looked as brittle as last summer’s dried twigs. He had a smoking hole in his chest and one in his stomach, but he came stalking up the midway as if nothing of this world could harm him.

  The earth churned and the tortured souls who had come to a grisly end in this grown-over field began to emerge. Up they came, through soil that boiled and bubbled as if being spewed from a great volcano. Men who had fled this land as slaves, hoping for a better tomorrow in a far off land, only to be dragged kicking and screaming back to their deaths, tortured by men who laughed as they beat them and laughed as they cut them, and laughed as they were tossed into graves they had been forced into digging for themselves.

  Up they came, women and children, who down through the ages had found themselves hung from every available tree limb in the clearing, for little or no reason at all. Those tarred and feathered, whose bubbling skin sloughed off in the field as they were dragged screaming across the rocky South Carolina soil; up they came, bearing leg irons and manacles, the ropes and rusty lengths of chain that had kept them company down below for all these years, for decades, for centuries, while the bloodline of those who had cast them down to their graves lived on and prospered.

  Until tonight, when all would pay, when all who had done wrong would die by the hands of those who had perished in this very field. Tonight, when all business would be concluded, and all accounts put finally to rest.

  The ground shook and the dead rose up and stood upon it, moaning as they moved not like Rick Reardon, like stiff-legged zombies who had forgotten how to walk, but like strong-willed beings with a sense of purpose that would not be denied them. They swarmed the midway, dragging men whose forefathers had enslaved them kicking and screaming across the clearing, to trees where ropes and chains were cast around strong white necks, tossed over sturdy tree limbs and pulled up, up, and up, while legs kicked and prayers that helped no one in this field before this night would help no one now.

  The ground shook and the earth bubbled up, creating a void which gobbled up Bo Johnson, who held desperately onto a thick, strong root as his shotgun dropped down into the abyss, his legs kicked and a stark and terror-filled scream rose up from his throat.

  They stood there, Justin and Mickey, watching a multitude of hands grab Jim Kreigle’s shoulders and arms wrap his waist and legs, and another set of strong black hands grab the man who loved the spinning cups head and turn it completely around: once, twice, three times, until bones cracked and skin split, and the head was torn completely away, blood pumping from his vacant shoulders as his body was dropped into a hole and his head tossed in behind it.

  They stood there, Justin and Mickey, as Byrum Terwillegher stood not in a canvas-covered booth looking out at every snot-nosed kid who had ever pissed him off holding baseballs in their hands, but in the middle of Godby’s field looking out at the corpses of those his fine southern forefathers had tormented down through the ages holding sharp-angled stones, which quickly came hurtling through the night air for him: one stone, two, five stones, ten, tearing him to shreds as he stumbled blindly in the dark, screaming and crying until his jaw was torn away and he fell frothing and bleeding onto the hard South Carolina soil he loved so deeply, breathing one last ragged breath as the ground opened up and took him away.

  They stood there, Justin and Mickey, until they could stand there no longer, until they could take no more. They could not watch Jerry McCrea, a man who had never done them harm, be snatched up by the walking dead and dragged to a sturdy oak tree. They could not watch him impaled upon a sharp, twisted tree branch protruding from its gnarled trunk, and when it happened they finally ran screaming themselves, away from the clearing and into a tent that was not the Sideshow tent, but one that had no banner above it and no drawings upon it. They stood in the dimly-lit tent as the screams of those whose forbearers had damned them echoed through the night. They stood in a tent whose lone artifact was a heavy square slate that sat angled on a sturdy wooden table in the center of the room, which once had held three columns of names consisting of half the men in and around Pottsboro, South Carolina etched upon it, but now held only one small row of names, which seemed to be dwindling by the second.

  They stood there, as one by one the screams dissipated, and one name after another magically dissolved from the slate.

  They could hear the screams and the moaning of the living dead, the howling voice of Hannibal Cobb and the sobbing of those who were trapped but had yet to be accosted. They looked up at the slate, relieved to see their names were not written upon it, but knowing Bo Johnson’s name had not been on it because he had not been drawn like a living zombie to the carnival, yet he too had been swallowed by the earth.

  And it was the knowing of this that made Justin say, “We can’t stay here. We’ve gotta leave. When they’re through with them, they’ll come for us.”

  “I can’t leave without my mom,” Reardon said. “I won’t.”

  “The Sideshow tent,” Justin said. “It’s the only place we haven’t looked. If she’s not there, she’s probably running like a bat outa hell for town.”

  Or swallowed whole by that boiling earth out there, Justin thought, though he would never have said it out loud.

  The screams were dying now; just a few names were left on the slate.

  They slipped out of the tent just in time to see Fred Hagen drawn and quartered by four huge black corpses, who threw what they held of him high into the night. They hurried down what was left of the midway, Reardon in front and Justin in back of him, the ax somehow still in his hand.

  The screams were dying now, drowned out by the moans of the walking dead, who had gathered around the last few sobbing survivors, men who were damned but had done nothing themselves to deserve a fate such as this, torn limb from limb by the howling mob, hung by the neck or impaled, drawn and quartered and cast down into the cold, dark earth.

  They ran into the Sideshow tent, but no one was there except the cages and the bizarre contents they held inside them, no hiding townsmen or moaning black walking dead, or Tricia Reardon, who Justin had never thought would be there, but hoped for his friend’s sake she might be. There was a curtain beyond the cages, one they had not noticed when they’d stood in this tent earlier tonight.

  “C’mon,” Mickey said, and then ran for the curtain, calling out, “Mom!”

  He ran and Justin followed him, into a backroom as dark and disturbing as anything they had yet seen tonight. Before them stood a raised metal gurney, whose slanted stainless steel channels had drained into the old washtub below until it was half full of blood. The gurney, covered with slick traces of blood itself, sat in the middle of the room, next to a bench which had upon it a white shirt and a pair of dark grey pants, a man’s Armani jacket and a string tie whose ends looped through a sterling silver medallion. Leaning against the gurney like a bizarre set of crutches were two severed legs, standing stiff and straight over two severed arms that lay crossed atop each other on the hard-scrabble ground.

  “Mom!” Reardon called out, but he had to have known she wasn’t there, to hope like Justin that she had gotten away and run screaming into the night before any harm could befall her.

  “She’s not here, Mickey,” Justin said. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

  They backed out through the curt
ain, back into the tent.

  They were about to turn and run, when Justin thought of those gigantic ears emblazoned on the side of the tent. He thought of Danny Roebuck, and just like Mickey Reardon a couple of hours ago, he had to know, one way or another.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, and Reardon said, “Why?”

  “Ears,” he said, and then nodded at the cages.

  They stepped up to the cage nearest the entrance, Reardon with Rusty Piersol’s service revolver, Justin still clutching his ax. They looked through the bars at the brightly-colored block of wood, whose clown’s laughing face emblazoned on its front had reminded Justin of a child’s building block, at the small little body with the gigantic ears, entombed in a jar of formaldehyde—or whatever it was floating around in. Its eyes were open and its mouth was moving slowly up and down. Its legs were moving and its hands were reaching out to Justin and Mickey.

  They saw the ears and they knew it was Danny.

  They knew it was Danny and they had to get him out, because once this place was gone it would never come back, and wherever it went, Danny Roebuck would be with it, floating around in a dark and murky world that would never release him.

  Justin pulled the ax up and over his back shoulder, and swung at the lock as hard as he could: once, twice, three times, five times, grunting with effort as his every swing bounced harmlessly off the cage, until Mickey Reardon stepped up beside him, aiming that .38 caliber revolver directly at the lock.

  “Hold up,” Reardon said, Justin taking a step back as Reardon fired his weapon, and kept on firing until the gun was empty and the steel door suddenly popped open.

  Then they were up to the cage, inside the cage, where Justin swung the ax one final time and the jar burst open, and all the fluid rushed out, carrying Danny Roebuck flopping to the floor of the cage with it.

  He sat there, gasping and clutching his stomach, looking up with eyes that to Justin seemed as wide and round as a couple of apples. He got to his knees, and then to his feet, his skin the wrinkled skin of a prune, his body still drenched in that dark and murky fluid.