Consumption

by Heather Herrman

  He looked at me then, and what I saw scared me more than if he’d been angry. He looked at me and he looked sad. So sad, like I had no idea what was coming, or what I was asking him. No idea, but I’d find out just the same.

  “Draw, Little Bear,” he told me. “I am almost done.”

  What could I do? I drew. I drew something coming out of the rock, out of that dark hole beside Lucy’s head. It wasn’t anything concrete, not yet, it was just a shadow. A shadow that looked a little like a man, and in the shadow I began to draw tiny faces, faces to make out the shape of The Shadow’s arm, his leg, his hand, which was reaching toward the place in the grass where little Lucy crouched. One of the heads looked a lot like Jimmy’s, and this made me smile. Then it made me smile. Now it makes me shudder. How could I have known?

  “My Apsáalooke brothers, they told me this story because they believe that although they are here now to protect the land from this Evil God, they won’t always be. Their numbers grow small, their blood weakened. Even now many of their children turn against the old ways, refuse to believe the stories of their elders. They told me because they had a vision. Their shaman, a man old enough to have seen the last awakening, he had a vision, Little Bear, and you were in it.”

  I stopped filling in the detail on the tiny Jimmy face I’d been working on. I felt a coolness brush across my brow as sweat popped out there. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like it one bit. I tried to laugh it off, but Trees gave me that look again, that sad, sad stare.

  “That’s stupid,” I told him. “What did he do, exactly? He came up to you and said: ‘I had a dream, Trees, and this girl named Jessi was in it, she and this bad man that tried to eat her up?’ ” I laughed again and bent my head back over my drawing so that Trees couldn’t see how scared I really was.

  “No, Little Bear, that is not what he said.” I felt Trees’s hand on me, and I leaned into it, grateful for the comfort of his touch. I turned to smile at his face, tell him that well, then, he’d got it wrong. No need to worry about it, but probably we should be getting back to the show. Probably I should be getting back to Jimmy.

  But Trees wasn’t done. He squeezed my arm and looked me right in the eyes. “The shaman told them that in his vision he saw a great army of these Children of the Bad Seed. ‘Feeders,’ he called them, because they were fed upon by The Evil and then fed for The Evil. The Feeders steal our bodies and use the evil that is already in us to be born. They feed not just on flesh but on the evil within us. They grow strong with it. This shaman, in his vision, saw a great army of Feeders, and in this army there was only one warrior standing against them and the world. Only one. A girl. Young and with the face of a white child but the spirit of The People. She fought against the army, though their number was many.”

  “So what?” I said. I was shivering now, and I’m sure Trees could feel me, shaking in his grasp. “That doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t mean anything at all!” I’m ashamed to say that I was shouting at him. I’d never raised my voice to Trees before, never for anything, but I did so then. I felt a tear on my cheek. I’d started to cry without even knowing it.

  “The shaman named the girl,” Trees continued. “He called her ‘She who Fights with the Spirit of the Bear.’ ”

  Then Trees pulled me to him, and I cried until all the tears were gone. He held me, and I held him, and I thank God that no men came by then to misinterpret the desperation with which we clung to each other.

  4

  I don’t know how to tell you what happened the final night of our show except to say that it was unexpected, despite Trees’s warning. We’d stayed on for an extra night, ignoring the protest of a few of the folks, including Trees, and we had a full house. By this time, I’d not only seen Jimmy at the last two shows, I’d also managed to sneak a kiss with him. Despite Trees’s dire prophecy, I couldn’t have been happier. I won’t say that I disbelieved what he said, because I didn’t. Trees never lied. He probably believed what the men on the reservation told him. Of course he did, or he wouldn’t have told me. So I didn’t disbelieve him either, I just thought he’d gotten it wrong somehow. Misinterpreted it.

  By the night of the last show, the encore, the sickness was already among us. According to the men Trees talked to, in order for whatever evil is tucked beneath Cavus to be set loose again, the earth must be opened and blood must be spilled in violence. I don’t know what the blood was, but I do know that with the coal miners beginning their digging, it must have been only a matter of time. A drunken fight, a man hitting another out of frustration over a slow load, a lip split with the back of an angry hand…who can say. I don’t know how it happened, or who the first Feeder was, the first to open the earth and swallow the poison, but I do know that by the day of the show he’d infected many others, most of them miners, but not all. Dear God, not all.

  The night of our last show, I saw many things that I did not understand at the time. I’m not sure that I understand them even now, but I’ll tell them to you. By writing them down perhaps I can make some sense of them.

  The first thing I saw that was wrong, really wrong, came with Clara. She didn’t show up for school the second day after Trees talked to me. But I saw her on the school ground, just the same. She was on the playground while I was still inside the classroom. I always sat by the windows in school if I could, and I’d managed to procure a window seat in Cavus. I was looking out the window, and a shape caught my eye, something darting across the grass and over behind the merry-go-round.

  When I looked closer, I saw that it was Clara. Only not Clara as I knew her. She wore no clothes, despite the crisp weather, and she ran with an unnatural speed. I raised my hand to excuse myself for the outhouse, and went to find her.

  You see, Pill, I thought she was sick. It was not often that I made friends on our stops. More often than not I was the child to be mocked at others’ leisure, the child to be shunned or, in the best-case scenario, ignored. And why not? Why not vent your frustrations on someone who will be here one day and gone the next? It does no more harm to call the wind names.

  But Clara had been different. She’d been my friend. And so when I saw her running about the playground in distress, I went to find her. I caught sight of her as soon as I stepped outside. She was crouched out of view from the windows of the school, hunched over the sandbox behind the storage shed. It was where some of the older kids went to exchange notes, hold hands, or even sometimes smoke. Now, though, there was no one there but Clara.

  “Hello, Jessi,” she said, without ever looking up at me. I thought then that she must simply have heard me approach, but now I think not. Now I think she was waiting for me.

  “Clara, what’s wrong?” She looked up at me, and I saw that her face was streaked with mud, as if she’d been eating the stuff. Indeed, she looked as though it was very possible. She was playing in it, and the stuff caked her arms all the way up to her elbows. It had been Clara’s only fault since I’d known her, a propensity for dirtiness, to play as roughly and rowdily as the little boys and to let no mud puddle or dirtied fence stand in her way. Now, though, she’d taken it to an entirely other level. Her naked body boasted streaks of mud and cuts across it.

  “Oh, Clara!” I said, kneeling beside her. “What’s happened to you?” I must confess that a dark thought crossed my mind, a thought that it was not her but someone else who had removed her clothes.

  “Nothing, Jessi dear,” she said. She held her hand out toward me, and in it was a clump of mud. “Have a bite,” she said, and I thought she was joking, and so I made as if to take it, only as I bent closer, I saw that there was something in it. A piece of white, like a bone. I got closer still, and saw that it was a tooth! And as I was leaning over it Clara brought the mud up with force, slamming it into my face and rubbing it against my lips with a strength I would never have imagined she possessed. I pulled away, wiping the filth from my lips, careful not to let it into my mouth. If Clara was someone who did not mind dirt, I was the oppo
site, clean almost to obsession, and it was this compulsion, I know now, that saved me. If I’d gotten even a speck of the blood that I have no doubt accompanied the tooth into my mouth, I’d have been infected.

  Instead, I managed to back away from Clara and wipe my mouth clean. “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “I’m trying to feed you,” she said. “You looked hungry.” Then she ran away, a crazy shutterbug run on all fours across the grass.

  When I went back inside, I tried to tell my teacher what had happened, but she wouldn’t believe me. She thought I was making it all up to get attention. Mostly, she didn’t trust me or my family. She thought that the circus was “a moral sinkhole,” and only agreed to educate me out of pity. Mostly, I didn’t care. But when she wouldn’t believe me about Clara, I’d had it.

  “Maybe you should take a look under your dress the next time you go to the lavatory,” I yelled at her, which was a big surprise to the whole class, as I’d gotten a reputation as “the quiet girl.” “That way,” I said, “you can figure out where all the bullshit is really coming from.”

  —

  Why am I telling you all this, Pill? Why? Reliving pointless conversations, pointless battles with my teacher, telling you that they thought of me as quiet? Why should you care? You know me better than anyone has ever known me. You don’t need me to tell you any of this, and my relationship with Mrs. MacIntire has nothing to do with what happened later. I’m stalling, Pill. Pure and simple, I’m stalling. I don’t want to go on.

  But I must. If this was to ever happen again, you’d need to know. You’d have to stop it, Pill. You have to stop it.

  5

  The changes in Cavus must have occurred slowly, over the space of a few weeks, if I had to guess. They were already well under way by the time our little show pulled into town. However, the thing with this sickness is that it is hard to detect. I’d guess that there were already half a dozen or so infected members by the time we arrived in town. It’s hard to tell, but as far as I understand the infection, it spreads from person to person at different rates. Once someone is infected, the disease lingers, it grows. The person begins to have desires. Not unnatural desires because whatever demon it is who has implanted itself in the host person feeds on the desires that already exist within that person. This demon, the Feeder, it loves our sin, dearest. Loves it and needs it. Which is how, in the end, we were able to beat it. Or at least put it back to bed.

  I went to the show that night only caring about Jimmy. I saw him, all right, but oh my God, I saw so much more. It started with Mama’s act.

  “You said you were done with the snakes,” I told her. “You said you were too old.” I’d walked into our wagon to find her near to naked, with her snake and snake oil both out on the table.

  “Nobody spoke to you, ma petite choux,” she said. “And you know you really shouldn’t speak until spoken to.”

  The reprimand was made to sound like a jest, but I could hear the sincerity behind it. She’d been infected already, you see, although I wouldn’t know it until that night. I don’t know when or how it had happened to her, but it must have been almost as soon as we arrived. I guess I will never know. It may have been one of the miners who did it or one of the townspeople that He turned earlier. Maybe it was even Clara. Who can say?

  The show that night was sold out, word about out stellar performances traveling fast. That, and The Feeder had decided our show would be the perfect place for him to play a game with the town of Cavus. My mother was the first one on the stage that night, her newly resurrected act deemed best placed at the beginning of the show, so that if something went wrong it might be smoothed over with later, better-prepared acts. Everyone in the tent anxiously awaited the first performer. When Mama took the stage, the crowd went wild. I hid in the back, where I had a good look not at the stage, but at the third row, five seats in. It was where Jimmy sat. I watched him even as my mother’s music started.

  She emerged onto stage with her snake, the great pale belly of the beast intertwined with her own flesh. The snake was an albino, and that night she did not paint its scales the usual red. Its ring patterns were a bright yellow, and they draped like gold over my mother’s darker flesh. She had never danced more beautifully than she did that night. It was as if the beast and she were one. As I’ve said before, if my mother had a sin, it was vanity. Always and forever, she wanted others to be looking at her, wanted youth to remain within her. And look they did.

  The audience, almost entirely men, watched her as if hypnotized, studying every move of her body, every turn of her hip. It was more than them simply wanting her, although it was clear that they did—many of their pants bulged with their own l’arme d’enfant—but it was more that they were under her spell. Whether they wanted her or not was irrelevant. They had to have her.

  When she ended her act, his act began. The Feeder took the stage.

  No one knew who He was at first. He took the guise of an old woman, a townswoman who stepped on trembling limbs up to the stage. She wore a long black gown and eyeglasses. She was not the kind of person to be at our show. Which is why, perhaps, when She stepped onstage no one tried to stop her. The circus people were mesmerized by her just as the men in the audience had been by my mother. Even I, smitten as I was with Jimmy in the folding chair below, felt compelled to watch the woman.

  There was a power about her, and I won’t say that it felt like evil. Not then. Because that would have been too simple, wouldn’t it? Evil is never so easily recognized. It makes its face known in a manner that pleases. No, it did not feel like evil, but it was a power nonetheless. She took the stage and we watched her, even as She began to speak and the content of her words betrayed her, we sat and watched as one. The circus folks, the miners, the people of Cavus. As one we watched.

  “Greetings, my dear children…” She held up her hand here, the one not on the cane, and offered us a wave and a smile. It was a silly gesture, charming, and there was a spattering of laughter. My mother stood beside her, watching, her snake still around her neck and her flesh damp with the sweat of her dance.

  “I come here tonight,” the woman said. “To make you an offer.”

  The crowd remained hushed, spellbound, as She continued to speak.

  “You do not know me and you do not know my sister. We are nothing great.”

  “I’ll say!” This from the crowd, a man’s voice.

  The woman ignored him. “But we could be. I could be. I do not want you to think that I speak to you falsely, that I offer myself to you with a false promise. I do not. I will not. I am not your Jehovah, your Jesus, your Allah, nor even your Satan. Nor is my sister your Lilith, nor your Mary. We are two of many. We are those who once walked the earth with you. The difference now, however, is that my sister is still allowed from time to time to walk amongst you, while I—”

  “Get on with the show!” the heckler’s voice rose again, and once again was ignored.

  “—daring to love you for what you were, for what you are, your wants and needs, your feedings and beatings and glorious desires…I was damned to forever live beneath you. To never walk amongst you. To never know you as my own.”

  There was a small titter from the audience, and the heckler, a foppish-looking man, certainly no miner, rose and donned his hat. As one the room turned to look at him.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “But if this is your idea of a show, I’ll pass. If I wanted to hear an old woman speak, I would have stayed at home with my mother-in-law!”

  Nervous laughter followed this. The woman onstage bent her head, as if wounded, and then more laughter followed from the audience. Braver this time. I looked toward Jimmy to see if he was laughing, too. He was. I laughed.

  With the speed of a snake that’s striking, the man beside the heckler, clearly a coal miner, the dirt still on him from his shift, reached up, grabbed the man, and neatly snapped his neck. The miner dropped the limp body to the ground.

  Nobody moved. The lau
ghter had dried up like spit in the wind.

  Onstage, the woman lifted her head, and her eyes glowed such a bright black that I could feel them penetrate even to me in my dark corner. Great convulsions began to roil beneath the woman’s wrinkled skin, convulsions that made her body seem to be alive with a festoon of insects under the flesh. Then they stopped, and the woman seemed to gather herself.

  “Rudeness,” she said, “will not be tolerated.”

  Silence. It was all happening so fast that no one even had the time to scream.

  “Although on occasion I do enjoy your sarcasm. Really I do, but this just isn’t the place for it.” For the first time, She smiled, a wide-open smile revealing her teeth. The audience gasped. Her teeth were cracked and broken off in places, but where they remained they were as long as index fingers, and sharp, whittled at the ends like needles. Her spittle gleamed from them like venom.

  “Now, then. As I was saying. Yadda, yadda, yadda.” She did a little leap on the stage, clicking her heels together as if She were twenty and a man. “I have an offer to make you. I’d like you to walk with me. To be my children, as it were. To raise the proverbial finger with me to that great asshole in the sky and his favored lily-livered offspring. Most especially to that cunt-lapper, my sister. Come be mine. Walk with me.”

  The audience turned toward one another, frightened murmurings beginning as everyone began to stand and push toward the door.

  But before they could escape, the massacre began.

  I don’t know how many Feeders there were, but it must have been more than ten or twenty, because afterward there were so many bodies. So many. Whatever the number, there was enough. There was more than enough. They rose from the chairs in which they sat, and as one they began to kill those beside them. They were townspeople, farmers, and miners alike. Amongst them were one or two from our circus. With the speed of something not of this world, they began. In front of me, a man rose to run his knife across the throat of his partner beside him. Behind him another rose and as one they turned in a synchronized movement to grab the person between them, one taking him by his foot, the other by his head, and they pulled until he tore clean in two. All the while they were screaming. Everywhere, everyone was screaming, the killers, the hunted, the onlookers.