“Get me out of here,” Danny said, and they helped him up out of the cage.
They had just stepped onto the ground when a commotion at the far end of the tent spun them around. They looked down the cages, past The Fat Lady and Sword Swallowing Sammy, The Alligator Boy and The Rubber Woman, past The Hands Of Wonder to the cage at the end of the line, where an armless and legless man with silvery-white hair sat on a pile of straw, moaning and banging his head against the bars. They knew who he was and they knew they couldn’t help him. He was beyond their help now, this grey-haired man who had once been one of the wealthiest men in the state.
He had no arms and he had no legs, nor did he have a tongue to speak with. He bashed his head against the bars and Hannibal Cobb’s long shadow suddenly found them. They turned to see Cobb standing a few yards away, casting a shadow that couldn’t possibly have reached them, but somehow it did. He stood before them, those impossibly long arms of his cast up toward the heavens.
“You shouldn’t have come back here tonight,” he said. “For no one here tonight can ever leave. You should have gone home and played with your dearly departed father, and you should have been careful of what you wished for.”
Cobb laughed.
“Dishes,” he said, and then took a step forward as Danny Roebuck, paralyzed with fear, dropped down to his knees and started to pray.
Cobb came closer and Justin stepped forward, swinging his ax. A finger was snapped and The Rubber Woman’s arms swept out of her cage like long flowing vines, easily slapping Justin’s weapon away from him.
Justin backed up against the cage, watching in horror as Hannibal Cobb’s long legs carried him past the ax, straight to Justin and Mickey. One foot on Danny Roebuck’s chest and one on the floor, he reached down and grabbed his two adversaries by the neck, grasping and squeezing and lifting them up off the ground, higher and higher as Justin clutched and clawed and grabbed the hat off Cobb’s head, but could get no closer, as his life slowly ebbed and the room grew dark, and the ax-head suddenly rose up and swept down in a high arcing swing that ended with a resonant thunk in the back of Hannibal Cobb’s skull, sending the tall man down to his knees, those long arms of his reaching around and trying free himself from Bo Johnson, who had slipped undetected into the tent while Cobb was busy crushing Danny Roebuck, and choking the life away from Justin Henry and Mickey Reardon.
Justin and Mickey helped Danny to his feet as Bo Johnson drew the ax from Hannibal Cobb’s skull, leaving behind a long, wide crack, from which escaped a gush of blood, and a shimmering white phosphorescent mist that lifted slowly into the air like a buzzing swarm of wasps, the shape of it changing as it slowly rose, from a blank featureless form to the outline of a face Justin knew he had seen before: in the pages of history books, on paintings that hung from the walls of staid old churches, on statues in museums, some without arms and others with them, all with fig leaves adorning their bodies. It sat there, hovering above Cobb’s prone and lifeless form, while Justin Henry and Mickey Reardon helped Danny Roebuck across the way, and The Rubber Woman’s impossibly thin arms stretched silently across the floor, grabbing Bo’s ankles and pulling his feet out from under him as the mist swooped down, seeping into his eyes, into his mouth and up through his nose, until Bo Johnson suddenly stood up and looked around the tent through eyes that weren’t his eyes at all.
He walked over to the cages and picked up that stovepipe hat.
“Run,” Justin said, when Bo calmly placed the hat upon his head.
“What about Bo?” Reardon said.
“Run!” Justin cried out as Bo turned to face them, and the three boys raced across the tent and out through the entrance, into the night and onto a landscape they no longer recognized, one that resembled the war-torn trenches of some far away country they hoped never to look upon again.
They ran through the clearing and up past the poles, up to Tricia Reardon’s car, where Danny Roebuck jumped into the back and Justin and Mickey climbed into the front, Justin in the passenger seat and Reardon back behind the wheel.
Reardon started the car and roared out of the clearing, up through the tree line and onto the old dirt road, leaving this thing, this entity who was no longer Bo Johnson, standing in the middle of the Sideshow tent staring down at his hands, which suddenly seemed impossibly long.
He rubbed his index finger against the flat pad of his thumb and a short plume of flame grew from it, snapped his finger forward like a matchstick and the flame went out. He pulled the long, black coat from Hannibal Cobb and draped it over his shoulders, and then turned and walked to the Sideshow tent’s exit.
Red streaks of dawn painted the sky as he walked out of the tent, up the midway, to a tent which had no banner flying above it, no pictures or writing emblazoned on its side. He stepped into the tent, past a blank, square slate that sat angled on a heavy wooden table in the middle of the floor. Under the table was a weather-beaten satchel—a valise, really—one that was very old. The fine pebbled leather, worn down over the years, was soft and smooth. He’d acquired the satchel so long ago that he could scarcely recall from whence it had come. Only that it was his, and it was where he kept the tools of his trade.
He had walked this land since the dawn of time, bringing long overdue justice and retribution to places like Babylon and Samaria, Versailles and Algeria, Auschwitz and Dachau; Juarez, Mexico and Sand Creek, Colorado, and Kansas City, Missouri, where Hannibal Cobb had come to him just as Bo Johnson had come to him tonight, in defense of those who had wandered blindly into their fate, those who did not deserve to be punished, but once inside the circle could never be allowed to leave it.
He took his valise and walked out into the night, this thing, this entity who wore Bo Johnson’s skin as if he were wearing a cloak. He ventured into the clearing and raised his arms high above his head, wiggled his fingers and out of a dense fog surrounding the clearing came a fat woman with curly black hair, a short man, who wore a straw hat and a red and white striped sports jacket. Out came a young girl in a skin-tight halter top, with blonde hair and gigantic breasts, and a peg-legged woman whose dark red hair spilled over her shoulders in ringlets and curls. Out came a man who was short and fat, bald on top with a black goatee on his chin, and another man with curly brown hair in a white t-shirt striped with horizontal blue lines, a ring in his ear and one in his nose. Out they came, all of them, into the clearing, and then into the tents and into the trucks, until the only thing left in Godby’s field was the thing that was now Bo Johnson, and the tools of Bo Johnson’s newfound trade.
Down came his arms and down came the tents, down came the poles and down came the flatbed trucks. Down came the pickup truck, and the Ferris wheel that had spun high above the tree tops; down it came, too, all of it shrinking until nothing was left but the toys of children these things actually were. He picked up the valise and walked through the field, kneeling and grabbing and putting all these items inside it: the Ferris wheel, which now fit into the palm of his hand, the tents, which now were no larger than postcards, the poles no larger than toothpicks. All was picked up and put away in his valise, until nothing was left except a flat wooden sign that read: Bosephus Johnson’s Carolina Carnival.
He picked up the sign, shoved it into the case and snapped the case shut.
Then he walked up through the clearing, leaving nothing behind but the torn and mutilated bodies of those whose souls would not be redeemed, and a multitude of those left hanging from every available tree limb in that overgrown field on the outskirts of Pottsboro, South Carolina.
He walked up the old dirt road and into the rising dawn, one footstep at a time, up the dirt road until his image began to fade, to dissipate like the early morning fog surrounding Godby’s field, until the image had faded clear out of sight, leaving nothing behind but the memory of him, and his footsteps on the old dirt road, which mere moments later were also nothing but a memory.
About the Author
William Ollie lives in Orange Park,
Florida, with a wife and two cats. His online presence is maintained at http://www.wmollie.com, and he invites any and all comments to be directed there.
Sideshow is his second published novel.
Sideshow Page 24