"No. Beyond putting my arm in his muh-mouth, he didn't touch me. He said it would be 'gratuitous.' What did he mean by that?"
George understood—perfectly. But how to explain to Ginger?
"He has a machine, the Device, as he calls it, that he's been reconstructing from components retrieved along the route of this tour. Brambles and I found the last Piece back in Long Island. Now he's just been killing time until the equinox, when he can put the Device to work."
"But what's it do?"
"He's been telling us since winter quarters that it's an instrument of change, that it will bring us justice, understanding, acceptance, and compensation, that it will alter the world's perception of us, change our place in the world so that we'll no longer be considered freaks."
"Maybe it's working already," Ginger said, looking up at him and trying a smile. "I don't consider you a freak."
George tightened his hold on her, but even Ginger's warmth and nearness could not ease the cold fear that had been growing within him since he'd begun reading Mysteries of the Veil.
"But Oz hasn't been telling us the whole story—or at least not to me. You see, according to Oz's father and the book I took, there's another world, another reality that borders on our own. Borders isn't even the right word—coexists is better. We somehow occupy the same space but we can't perceive each other. We're separated from that other place—'the Otherness'—by what the book calls 'the Veil,' some sort of barrier that keeps our two realities from intermingling. The Device can breach that barrier, can create a pinhole between the two realities and let some of the Otherness through."
"Is that bad?"
"I'd say so. Look, almost all of us in the Emporium are a special kind of freak. Our deformities are the result of exposure as fetuses to the Otherness that leaked through the Device. This Otherness is a much older, more dominant, more powerful reality than ours. It changes any of our reality it touches."
"Well then how is that pinhole going to help people understand you?"
"It won't. But Oz isn't planning a pinhole. He has a special substance—the book is vague as to what it is or where he gets it, but it acts as a fuel for the Device. And at the proper time and place, he can cause a permanent rip in the Veil."
Ginger drew back and stared at him. "What will that mean?"
"The Otherness will flood into our world, infiltrate our reality, changing it, overwhelming it until both sides of the Veil are the same."
"Why would he want that?"
"Because then you'll be the freaks and we'll be the norms."
"But that's awful. I mean, that's horrible! He'd destroy everything? Why?"
George looked away. "You'd have to spend your life on our side of the fence before you could completely understand."
Ginger rose and paced the tiny room in a tight circle.
"What are we talking about? The whole thing's crazy! Why are you buying into it? Oz is obviously nuts, or he's been dropping acid, or both!"
"Maybe," George said. "But I can't risk him being right. I've got to go find this bald spot."
"Why?" Ginger stepped back and stared at him. "If he's going to make you a normal, why should you want to stop him?"
"Because of you." George rose and faced her. "I’m used to being a freak. I’ve had a lifetime of practice; you haven’t. So I want things to stay as they are. Because with you by my side there’s nothing this world can throw at me that I can’t handle."
Ginger ran forward and leaped into his arms. She sobbed against his neck, then stepped back.
"I’m going with you."
Try as he might, he couldn’t talk her out of it.
Burlington County, NJ
1
"Are we lost?" Ginger said as she guided the borrowed, aging Honda along the sandy rut that passed for a road in this wilderness.
Twice already they'd become mired in sand. The car's front-wheel drive and George's shoulder against the rear bumper had got them free, but next time they might not be so lucky.
"I'm not sure." George sat in the passenger seat, a map on his lap, one tentacle pinning Oz's instructions, the other curled around a flashlight. "How many miles since that last turn?"
Ginger checked the trip odometer. "Three."
"Keep going till we hit five and a half."
They'd followed the directions up the Garden State Parkway to a state highway, then a county road, then an unlabeled blacktop. With each turn the road had become narrower, the pavement rougher, the surroundings more deserted and desolate until they were now on this sandy path in the middle of a huge nowhere known as the Jersey Pine Barrens.
The night seemed to have congealed around them. So dark. Not even stars above. Ginger never would have thought it possible to feel trapped out in the open like this, but that was what she was feeling now. The overcast sky seemed to press down on them; the scraggly, angular pines lining the road leaned over them like the bars of a cage.
"Turn here!" George said suddenly.
Ginger skidded to a stop, backed up, then swung left onto an even narrower road. She braked to a halt.
"Let's face it, George. We're lost."
George opened his mouth to speak, but leaned forward instead, staring up through the windshield.
"Look."
Lights were moving through the sky, globules of pale fire floating overhead in a line parallel to the path they were on. Heading away. Ginger's mouth went dry as a crawly sensation wormed through her belly.
"This is scary, George. Let's go home."
"You might not have a home to return to if we turn back now. Follow the lights. They seem to know where they're going. Maybe they're headed for the bald spot too."
Reluctantly Ginger put the Honda in gear and headed down the road.
"What's this bald spot anyway?"
"It's what the book calls a 'nexus point.' It's real complicated and I couldn't understand half of it, but from what I gather there are places on Earth where the Veil that separates us from the Otherness comes loose for a little while during the equinox. This bald spot is one of those nexus points."
"Why do they call it the bald spot?"
"Because after being exposed to the Otherness twice a year for who knows how long, nothing grows there. Not even a weed."
Ginger drove on, her sweaty palms slick against the wheel. She drove until she ran out of road, until the path ended in a sandy cul-de-sac. Theirs wasn't the only car here—half a dozen vehicles lined the little clearing. Her headlights flashed across words like Jeep and Isuzu as she swerved to avoid them.
"I guess we're not lost after all," George said. "Those belong to Oz."
Ginger got out and looked around. "Where do we—?"
No need to ask. Behind the trees lay a rise. The globs of light were streaming that way. Many streams, gliding in from every direction, all converging somewhere beyond that rise, a place where pale violet light flashed, silhouetting the gnarled, twisted pines.
She glanced at George. She could see his face in the backwash from the headlights. His eyes were wide, his expression strange. She saw none of the unease creeping through her like a snake. No . . . something else. A yearning.
He looked almost . . . eager.
"Let's go," he said.
He didn't wait for her to agree or disagree. He began walking, shining the flashlight along the narrow sandy path that led through the trees. Ginger hurried after him. They passed through a collection of shanties, recently deserted. Whoever lived here had run off.
Good idea, she thought. If I had half a brain, I'd get out of here too.
The violet flashes grew brighter and more frequent as they trudged up the slope. George didn't say a word the entire trek. It was like he had a one-track mind, like someone had a rope around his neck and was pulling him toward the light.
He stopped dead when he reached the top of the slope. Ginger crept up behind him and peeked around his left side. They’d broken into a clearing atop the rise—a grassy field rimmed with pine
s that were especially stunted and twisted. She froze when she saw what was happening in the clearing.
Madness.
The only way to describe it . . . madness and chaos. Globs of light swirled and swooped over, around, and through the air above the clearing, dipping in and out of a dome of violet light that flashed and sparked at its center. The dome covered what had to be the bald spot—a roughly circular area devoid of even a hint of vegetation.
And clustered in the center of the spot, at the pulsating heart of the violet light, were Oz and the people from his freak show. The landscape around and behind them didn't match the landscape here. No pines, no grass or underbrush, only a wide flat plain and some sort of mountain range in the distance. The perspective was somehow wrong. It made her dizzy. That wasn’t the world she knew. It was someplace else. Someplace . . . other.
The Otherness.
But Ginger's gaze was drawn back to the freaks, all naked, all their awful deformities exposed to the night, all standing in a loose circle around some strange assemblage of odd-shaped parts seated in a shallow tray. That could only be the Device George had told her about. As she watched, Oz tilted a black box and poured a smoky fluid over it.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then she saw Oz point to the Device and noticed how some of its components had begun to move, rotating at different angles.
And then the dome began to writhe and twist. Tendrils of violet light wormed off its surface and began stretching into the air, along the ground, spreading beyond the border of the bald spot, coiling around the nearby stunted vegetation, engulfing it, changing it.
The dome of Otherness expanded, rising, spreading, following its pathfinding tentacles.
"It's coming this way, George!"
George made no reply, only stood there, staring.
"George!"
He shook himself and looked at her. His expression was slack but his eyes were alive, dancing with reflections of violet light.
"It's working," he said softly. "The Device is working. It's widening the gap, tearing the Veil. The Otherness is coming."
Why wasn't he afraid? Why didn't his face show any of the terror ripping through her? What was happening to him?
Ginger glanced again at the bald spot and cried out with alarm at how far the Otherness had spread. It had taken over most of the clearing now, moving to within a dozen feet of them. The trees and vegetation touched by the Otherness were changing, twisting and spreading into new, alien shapes, blossoming with heavy, salivating flowers and spiny, pulsing fruit.
As Ginger watched, a rabbit bolted from its burrow and ran in panicked circles in the violet light. Suddenly something long and thin and white with slavering jaws whipped out of the empty burrow and fastened its teeth on the rabbit's back. The poor creature screamed briefly as it was shaken violently until its neck snapped. Then the white thing dragged its limp and silent meal back to the rabbit’s former home.
Without a word, George began walking forward.
"What are you doing?" Ginger cried.
"I've got to go."
She grabbed his arm. "George, you can't go in there!"
"I've got to," he said, shaking her off. "It wants me. And I . . . I want it."
He strode forward, away from her, into the violet light. Ginger started to follow, to try to drag him back, but as she reached into the light she felt the Otherness, sensed its alienness, its implacable enmity. Her arm snatched her hand back of its own accord, so violently that she stumbled backward and fell.
She couldn't go into that light, not in a million years.
As she saw the leading edge of the Otherness creep toward her she scrambled to her feet and retreated, screaming George's name, but he gave no sign that he heard her.
2
It wasn't night here. And not like any sort of day George had ever seen.
He stared around in fearful fascination as he scuffed through the blue sand toward Oz and the rest where they stood in the Otherness-equivalent of the bald spot.
The Otherness. It was so much bigger than the reality he knew; the horizon had no curve, seemed so much farther away. The violet light had no source and seemed to radiate from the clear sky. Dim, boulder-rough moons raced across that sky while the clouds stayed low, roaming the endless plain at ground level. Far off to his right a range of sharp-edged ebony mountains stretched into the stratosphere. His own movements seemed slower, the air thicker. This reality felt so much older; the incalculable age of the place weighed upon him like a shroud.
And yet as much as he feared it, as much as it repulsed him, a part of him responded to it. Something deep inside knew this place, called it home.
Ahead, Oz turned and waved him toward the circle. The huge mouth in his belly mirrored and magnified the smile of welcome on his face. George had wondered at the nature of the "hideous deformity" Jacob Prather had mentioned; and though Ginger had described it, the sight was still a shock.
"George!" the mouth boomed—sound, too, was different here. "You've come to join us. Welcome home!"
Carmella, startlingly beautiful in her nakedness, stepped forward and grabbed his arm, pulled him into the circle. Violet light flashed from her three eyes. They were all there: the Beagle Boys, Delta, Janusch, Bramble, and all the rest. George noticed with a start that Tarantello’s groin was smooth as a Ken doll, but forgot that when he spotted Clementine’s udder.
And in the center of the circle sat the Device, wreathed in smoke from the fluid pooled at its base. All of Bramble’s branchlets were milling around it, alive and well. Maybe they wouldn’t need Bramble here.
Oz had an onyx box in his hand. He stepped forward and poured more of the smoking fluid over the Device.
"We're creating a new world from the old one, George. A new world, our world, where we'll decide what’s ‘normal.’ The tear is small now, but already the Otherness is moving into our old world. Slowly now, but as we extend the tear, its rate of flow will increase. And soon the tear will be irreparable. Then it will be Genesis, George. A new Genesis. And this time we get to play God."
George turned and looked back the way he had come. He saw footprints—his and the others'—leading this way through the blue sand that stretched on forever. But a few dozen feet away they stopped, as if someone had swept the sand clean of all markings. He saw Otherness-mutated trees and brush, but where were the millions of acres of the Pine Barrens? Where was Ginger?
Ginger!
The memory of her came like a splash of icy water in the face. She was out there somewhere, terrified—for herself, but mostly for him. For him.
And what was he feeling for her?
Part of him wanted Oz and the rest to have their way. These people—deformed like him, outcasts like him—they'd taken him in and made him part of their family when everyone else had discarded him. They wanted this.
And damn it, he wanted it too. Or at least that part of him did. Another part wanted to be back with Ginger, wanted to protect her from the horror that the Otherness would make of her daily existence.
And yet . . . he felt he belonged here. He held up his tentacles and stared at them, coiling and uncoiling before his face. Not to have to hide them, to flaunt them instead. What would that be like?
No. It wasn't enough. The belonging he sensed here couldn't replace how he felt with Ginger. Nothing the Otherness could offer would ever top that.
George turned again toward the Device. Oz had just finished emptying the contents of still another onyx box over it. Without allowing himself to think, without giving himself a chance to change his mind, George made two quick steps into the center of the circle and booted the Device, putting all the force he could muster behind the kick.
Pain shot up his leg as pieces of the Device were knocked loose and sent flying, tumbling through the air in a dozen directions. Shouts of shock and rage rose on all sides as bolts of light—white, pure light—flashed from the damaged Device and arced into the sky. A wind began to blow, swirling the sand
into stinging blue vortices.
"The tear!" Oz shouted. "It's closing! Everything's being undone. Find those Pieces and bring them to me!"
Not enough, George realized. Not enough merely to knock the Pieces loose. Oz could simply reassemble them. George had to bury them, scatter them where they couldn't find them.
Or better yet, put one beyond their reach. Just one. The Device was useless if it was incomplete.
George spotted a Piece at his feet. He wrapped one of his tentacles around it and ran. Back. Back along the way he'd come. He squinted against the swirling sand, trying to stay on course, but the gusts had filled and smoothed his tracks. Ahead of him the air shimmered and flashed with darkness, while behind him George heard baying howls from the Beagle Boys as they took up the chase.
He kicked up his speed. If they got hold of him, who knew what they might do?
3
The steady advance of the violet light of the Otherness had backed Ginger over the edge of the rise, and now she was retreating down the slope.
She sobbed with every backward step. George had left her, deserted her for the other freaks. She'd seen the way he'd let Carmella take his hand and lead him into that circle. And now the Otherness was coming, changing everything, taking over—
Then she noticed a change in the violet light. Its questing tendrils withdrew as its leading edge flickered and began to pull back. Hesitantly, she followed its retreat. When she regained the top of the rise she could see the clearing again, still within the shrinking dome of violet light. But the light had a grainy, ground-glass appearance. She thought she saw a shadow moving within—a number of shadows.
Suddenly a figure burst from the violet light and came bounding across the clearing toward her, running as if the hounds of Hell were on his tail.
"George!"
His features were dim in the violet glow, but his expression was frightened, desperate. Without a word he pushed her back into the shadowy brush at the edge of the clearing and thrust something into her hand.
"Hide here. Don't move. Don't make a sound no matter what happens. I'll be okay. I'll be back for you."
The Peabody-Ozymandias Traveling Circus & Oddity Emporium Page 10