“‘Voluntary Damnation Form. To be filled in by the damnee. EAGH/I.’” He straightened up. “I see the hand of Arthur Trubshaw at work here.”
“You’re not wrong,” replied the Little Old Man as he tied the package up again. “One hundred forms to be handed in fully completed in a little less than a year’s time. Feeling up to it, Johannes?” He passed over the box. Cabal hefted it and looked around.
“I’m not sure. I accepted this challenge on the understanding that I would have the Carnival of Discord on my side. As yet, all I seem to have been given is a rolling junk shop. Tell Satan — no carnival, no deal.”
“No carnival? No carnival? This is it! Wagons roll! The Greatest Show on Earth! Use your imagination, why don’t you?”
“Imagination? I’d have to be hallucinating before I could believe this shambles was the Greatest Show on Earth.”
The Little Old Man got up from the crate and walked over to the back wall, shaking his head and muttering about young folk today. Leaning against the wall was a stack of broad wooden boards half covered by a tarpaulin. This he whipped off in possibly the weakest theatrical flourish Cabal had ever seen, to reveal that the boards were signs — battered and peeling, but signs nonetheless.
“Here you go. Here are your sideshows. ‘See! From the Mysterious East! The Enigmatic Cleopatra! Three Thousand Years in the Tomb Yet Still the Most Beautiful Woman in the World!’ Good, eh? What’s this one? ‘Marvel at the Bat-Faced Boy! Direct from the Darkest Jungle!’ Woooooh! Scary stuff, isn’t it?”
“The sheer preponderance of exclamation marks is terrifying in itself.”
“That’s just traditional. ‘Gasp! At the Log-Headed Girl!’ That can’t be right.” He probed at the flaking paint. “Surely it should say ‘ Dog-Headed Girl’? Oooh, no. It does say ‘ Log-Headed.’ That’ll pull the crowds.” He nodded confidently at Cabal.
Cabal had lost patience with the Little Old Man’s drivel. He stood by the open door watching Dennis and Denzil’s painfully slow progress along the trackside with the mildest interest possible.
“Oh, yes,” he said over his shoulder. “They’ll come from miles around for this. ‘Roll up, roll up. See the world’s largest collection of antediluvian signage. Gasp at the decrepitude. Be astounded by the grammar. A fascinating show rivalled only by the lint in your navel.’ I’ll have to fight them off with a stick.”
The Little Old Man narrowed his eyes and thought carefully.
“That’s sarcasm, isn’t it?”
Cabal looked out at the Flatlands again. He really didn’t care anymore. This whole thing was another of Satan’s dim-witted jokes. He had no idea why he bothered.
“Yes,” he replied. “That’s sarcasm.” He turned and walked over to the stack of signs. “This is a pointless enterprise without personnel. I don’t have any.”
A sound made them turn to the door. Dennis had reached it and was just contemplating how best to climb up when Denzil — who’d got the rhythm of walking worked out to his satisfaction but hadn’t yet appreciated the myriad complications involved with stopping — walked into him. They both fell out of sight. After a moment, there was the sound of a slow and considered fight.
“Well, none worth speaking of,” Cabal corrected himself. “If I’m not even to be provided with people to try to make something of this mess, then you might as well have these forms back now.”
The Little Old Man cackled.
“How can you say that, Johannes? Don’t you like a challenge? Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Easily outweighed by my sense of being made a fool of.”
“But you have been provided with people. Sort of. Look around you.”
Cabal looked around him. He was still alone in a grimy dump of a boxcar with only the dubious company of the Little Old Man. “I am looking. All I am seeing, however, are candidates for landfill. What are you getting at?”
The Little Old Man went to the centre of the car and swept his arms around to encompass all that was lying about the place. As a dramatic gesture, it might have been at home in musical comedy. Light musical comedy. “Here are your people, all around you.” He reached into a box and pulled out a bone that Cabal immediately recognised as a human femur. “Here are your riggers” — he dropped it and plucked a ball of hair from a sack — “your barkers” — he put his hand on what Cabal had assumed were rolls of cloth leaning in the corner. “Your concession-stand holders. Your whole carnival is here. Just use a little” — he tapped his temple — “imagination.”
Cabal walked over to inspect a roll. “What do you mean?” He looked closely at the material and belatedly realised what it was. “This,” he said dryly, “is human skin.” There was no reply. He looked around, but the Little Old Man had vanished.
Marvellous, Cabal thought. I don’t even get an instruction book.
He took a small black object from his pocket and squeezed a button on its casing. A wicked-looking blade flicked out. He unrolled some of the “cloth” from the dark roll and cut a long strip from it. Then he got a small ball of hair from the sack, a rag from a barrel, and finally the femur. He carefully tied the hair to the bone, using the piece of cloth. “A rag, a bone, a hank of hair,” he intoned quietly as he wrapped the whole thing in the strip of skin. He regarded the finished object with a scornful shake of the head. “I hate this sort of thing.” He looked for some clear floor. “‘I invoke thee.’” So saying, he lobbed the untidy mess into the clearing.
Down in Hell, a black ball of blood diminished very slightly in size.
The mess came apart long before it reached the floor with more violence than might be regarded as natural. The bone hit the floor first and stopped abruptly, standing neatly vertical. The skin struck it and wrapped tightly about it, so tightly that after a moment it was impossible to tell where its edges were. The bone lurched as more bones budded and flowed from it, but as quickly as the new bone appeared it was submerged in the flowing skin. The small ball of hair landed on top of the growing stack of organic material, teetered, and fell off. It tried repeatedly to regain a perch but seemed doomed to failure. The rag whirled around and around the structure, too fast for Cabal’s eye to follow closely but he got the distinct impression that it was changing colour. The stack of bones was producing a spinal column with a painful clicking pop as each vertebra grew out of the one beneath it. As it completed the thoracic section, ribs sprang out like the opening of a clothless umbrella. The skin flowed upwards like the rising level of a liquid within a glass, almost concealing the bubbling formation of organs within the torso. Arms suddenly burst out as swiftly as the blade of a flick-knife, reminding Cabal to put his away. The circling rag swept in and flew a complex weaving pattern over the surface of the body, and where it flew, clothing appeared. Like ghastly toast, the skull popped up from the neck and grinned maniacally in the way that skulls do. Even when the skin wrapped over it, it continued to grin at Cabal with immodest glee. The skin rolled over the ivory vault of the brainpan like a rising tide over a boulder on the beach, met at the top, and sealed.
Standing before Cabal was a man who hadn’t existed a minute before: slightly shorter than he, black, painfully thin, and dressed in black trousers, white shoes with black spats, a white shirt, and a gleaming waistcoat of black and white vertical stripes. In his hand was a straw boater with a yellow band about it. The man clapped it on his head just in time to prevent the hank of hair settling on his entirely bald skull. A few hairs made a dive for his forehead and knitted quickly into eyebrows, but the rest balanced on top of the boater forlornly for a moment before dropping lifeless to the floor. The man watched it go with dawning dismay, quickly lifting his hat and checking his skull. He was disappointed to find that he was as bald as a cue ball.
“Oh,” he moaned, “oh, man,” and finally, with an air of exasperation, “oh, shit!” He looked down his body, examined his wrists, looked at Cabal as if the roof had just fallen in, and ran around. “A mirror, man! There’s gott
a be a mirror around here!” Cabal watched him run. The man found a large grimy piece of silvered glass that may have once been part of a mirror and held it up to his face. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing and scrubbed at the surface. It didn’t improve things.
“Look at me,” he wailed. “Look at me. You’ve made me the skinniest guy in the whole world!”
“I did nothing of the sort,” said Cabal testily. Everybody was such a critic. “I summoned you. That’s just the way you turned up. Don’t presume to blame me for any physical shortcomings you might display.”
“But, but…” The man put down the mirror and approached Cabal, emphasising every syllable with his hands. “But you were the one sortin’ out the components, man. Where’s my fat?”
“Fat?” Cabal realised he may have made a small oversight. “Rag, bone, hair. That’s traditionally it. Nobody ever said anything about fat.”
The painfully thin man waved his hands in disbelief. He looked quickly around the car and ran for the corner in long, angular strides. He grasped a crate and pulled it out into the open. Stencilled on the side was a single word: “Lard.”
“Just a little dollop, that’s all, man. That’s all I needed! I could’ve been a fine-lookin’ man, guy. Instead of which, I’m nothin’ but a bag of bones.” He looked beseechingly at Cabal. Cabal looked back at him with a profound lack of sympathy.
“Well, Bones, what do you expect me to do about it? An intravenous drip of melted butter, perhaps?”
“D’ya think that would work?” asked Bones with piteous hope.
“Not for a second. Look, in a little less than a year, all this” — he indicated the immediate environs — “goes, and you, my vain friend, return to the components whence I raised you. So — you must try to understand one simple thing. In one year’s time, there won’t be enough of you left to amuse a dog. Thus, I don’t care what you look like, and neither should you. Our immediate concern should be getting this show on the road. Now, are you going to help, or am I going to have to dispose of you as an unsuccessful experiment and try again?”
Bones put his hands on his hips and allowed himself to slouch into a sassy pose not unlike a crane-fly with attitude. “You am de boss, baaaahss. Dis dumb-ass boy sure am yours to comman’, an’ ain’t dat de trufe?”
“Excellent,” replied Cabal, unperturbed. “Now, come over here.”
“I was bein’ sarcastic,” said Bones in his normal voice — a cadenced tone in a largely American accent with perhaps a hint of French growling through the long vowels — as he walked to where Cabal crouched by the stack of signs.
“You were being tiresome. Look at these.”
“Freaks, derring-do, eighth wonders of the world. Looks pretty standard sideshow stuff to me.”
“So which ones are exciting? Which ones will people come from near and wide to see? I need to know.”
Bones looked at him questioningly. “Why you askin’ me, boss? You the man with the plan, aren’t you?” He looked closely at Cabal. Cabal continued to go through the boards, trying to find the secret. “You have got a plan?”
Cabal stood up and stepped away. He glared at the signs. “I don’t understand. Why would anybody want to waste their time looking at this sort of nonsense? It’s just rubbish! Bogus exhibits, deleterious mutations, lies! None of this is real! None of it’s lasting! They’re just…” He sagged. He hadn’t felt so useless in years. “Dreams. I don’t understand it.”
Bones was having a few problems as well. “But you volunteered for this, didn’tcha? Him downstairs wouldn’t just sock you with this gig unless you knew what you were doing, would he?”
“It’s … a wager.”
“A bet?” If Bones had lived a generation for every one of the five minutes he had so far drawn breath, he still couldn’t have been more surprised. “You got a bet on with the Man himself? You’re crazy! Nobody ever wins against the Man! He’s …” Bones tried to think of a convincing metaphor. He failed. “He’s the MAN, man!”
Behind the dark spectacles, fire returned to Cabal’s eyes. “He’s not going to win this one.”
“You’re kiddin’ yourself!” muttered Bones with evident disdain. “Only folks in stories get the drop on His Satanic Luciferiness. Sorry to be the one to break the news an’ all, but you’re screwed, Jack.”
Cabal ignored him. He was looking at the signs again.
“I have to work to a budget, so I can’t just start everything. I have to make some management decisions about what to go with and what to leave. Some of these sideshows will be useful; others will just waste my resources. I need advice. Mr. Bones, which sideshows shall I invest in?”
Bones shook his head regretfully. “I can’t help you, boss. End of the day, I’m just walkin’ dust. You’re the only real person round here. Your call.”
“I can’t,” replied Cabal conclusively. “I don’t understand people, either. I’ll have to get my advice from somewhere else.” He looked into the distance for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath. “I think I know just the person.” He walked to the exit and jumped down onto the track. Denzil and Dennis were sitting by the train, throwing stones at the crow. None were going even remotely close, but it watched the proceedings with keen interest all the same. “You two,” he spoke sharply. “Obey Mr. Bones’s instructions until I return.”
They looked up as Bones stuck his head out and looked down on them from immediately above. He grinned. “Howdy!” They smiled dozily and waved back.
“Crow! Here!” Cabal ordered. The crow flew to him without hesitation and landed upon his shoulder. “You’re coming with me, so I know you’re not up to mischief.”
“Kronk!” said the crow smugly.
Bones leaned on the doorjamb. “So what do you want me and the corpse boys to be doin’ while you’re gone, chief?”
Cabal pointed towards the engine. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. It might be a few days. In the meantime, clean out the locomotive and get together some fuel. Do you know what it burns?”
“Just about anythin’.”
“Good. Load up the fuel car with wood, and fill the boiler with water. There are lots of ponds and streams around here. That shouldn’t be a problem. Then see if you can get the line clear back to the junction. We’ll need to be under way as soon as the carnival’s put together.”
Bones glanced at the trees and pursed his lips. This didn’t look like a small task. “Is that all? Nothin’ else?” Cabal thought hard. Bones sighed. Him and his big mouth.
“Yes, if you’ve got any time left, I want the name of the carnival painted on the first broad-sided car, both sides. Can you sign-paint?”
“Sure, I can sign-paint, I can do most stuff if I put my mind to it. What do you want to call it, boss?”
Cabal told him.
Bones whistled appreciatively. “Man, you’re just full of surprises.”
CHAPTER 3
in which Cabal covers old ground and gets the show on the road
Burial: it’s a personal choice. There are, of course, those who don’t care to be buried at all but prefer to be burnt or left in the open for vultures to pick at or something else equally unhygienic.
They are of no concern here.
Those who do want their bodies interred have different visions of how they’d prefer the environs, as if it would make a difference to them at this juncture. Some imagine a green churchyard on a spring day, the sound of bells calling the faithful to worship, the immaculate grass verges, the white pebbled paths. Some — usually the ones who wear a lot of black and think that Byron must have been mad, bad, and fabulous to know — dream of tenebrous graveyards in the shades of monstrous Gothic churches, beneath a dark, lowering sky that threatens thunder and lightning any second. Being near a mountainous sea wouldn’t hurt, either. Others would like a tree to be planted over their otherwise unmarked graves, so that their bodies might nourish the roots of a mighty oak or sycamore.
All these desires can
be understood and to a greater or lesser extent sympathised with. It is, however, impossible to have the faintest idea what was going through the minds of the people who bought plots in the Grimpen Burial Ground. Perhaps they hated their relatives and wanted to drag them into one of the ugliest and most depressing places on Earth, if only for the funeral.
The Grimpen Burial Ground stood — if that is the right word, and “lay” if it is not — in the heart of the last marsh in the land that, until recently, contained malaria. No effort had been necessary to wipe out the last of the disease-carrying anopheles mosquitoes; they simply seemed to give up the will to live.
The burial ground itself had been cunningly placed on the head of a peninsula that could be safely reached only by traversing a long and serpentine isthmus surrounded on all sides by a sucking bog of the sort that makes frequent appearances in adventure stories. None could guess how many arch-criminals, diabolical Gypsies, and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know had breathed their last, frantic, gasping breaths before vanishing beneath the clinging filth. It was likely to be a fair few.
Then onwards, along the winding, desperate path, until one reached the burial ground’s rusting gates. Predictably, one hung from a single hinge and screeched eerily, given the excuse of the faintest breeze. And in the Grimpen Burial Ground, breezes never got stronger than faint, for anything stronger might perhaps have made headway in shifting the mists. That would never do. People talk about the London pea-soupers, but although those legendary fogs may have been yellow, unhealthy, and thick enough to bottle, they had absolutely no class. The Grimpen mists, in contrast, had style to spare. They drifted slowly and enigmatically, eldritch and eerie, ever encroaching, enveloping all. They had the air of watching and waiting. People hated attending burials there; the mists, the infamous mists, seemed to be watching the living. And waiting for them to die.
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