“Should we tell Stafford?”
The argument over whether we would be dealing with Stafford or Miss De Vere had never been resumed, but Skinner seemed untroubled.
“I’ll drop him a line to let him know we’re on the trail,” he said. “Now then, this is where it gets interesting.”
The bus to Streatham Common was crowded with people in a holiday mood. The schools were out, and it seemed that everyone had children with them. Wary, I squeezed myself into a corner to keep from accidentally crushing any stray toddlers underfoot. At the junction with the High Road, we all spilled out like a seedpod bursting, and Skinner and I allowed ourselves to be carried along with the crowd through the archway and into the summer fair.
The fairground was a cheerful chaos of steam calliope music and swirling crowds fired up with excitement by gaudy colours and the barkers outside every tent and every ride. A giant papier-mâché clown with a red nose welcomed everyone in. Vendors hawked candyfloss and toffee apples and paper cones of monkey nuts. Parents waved to their children as they spun past on the merry-go-round, and there were shrieks from the camel ride as two girls were hoisted into the air.
Three boys ran past, shouting and laughing, contributing to the air of near riot. It was a scene of carnival, bringing back memories of those happy days before the war when there was nothing better than to be a boy in a fairground with a shilling your pocket. How my brother and I always looked forward to the day the fair arrived. The posters would go up two weeks before, and then another lot of posters one week before, and we would count the days.
“The old gaff! Like coming home, isn’t it?” said Skinner, beaming at the whole performance. “Just keep your eyes open now, because I would be surprised if we were not being followed.”
We sauntered through the row of shooting galleries and watched men trying to impress their sweethearts by shooting painted ducks with an air rifle.
“Tuck that elbow in, soldier!” Skinner instructed cheerfully in his sergeant’s voice after one fellow missed three in a row. “And don’t hold your breath when you aim.”
The man shot him a dirty look, but Skinner just laughed, and a second later, the would-be marksman laughed back just as loud. Even shooting was a frivolous business at the fair, and rifles meant larking about for teddy bears, not trench warfare.
I jerked my head, indicating I had spotted a man watching us from two stands over. Skinner nodded and moved on.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I’m going to take you on the Grand Tour. See whether our shadow can stand the pace. Now then, where’s that Hanson put his slanger this year?”
He headed off purposefully past a row of spinning tombola wheels, each offering more lavish prizes than the last. Seeing someone he recognised manning one of the stalls, he exchanged some words, few of which I understood. Then he set off briskly and turned at a sign pointing to Freddie Hanson’s Sporting Academy. It read, “England’s Premier Pavilion—All Comers Challenged.”
“You just follow my lead, Harry,” Skinner said, lifting the flap. “I’ll show you how to make a bit of pocket money.”
The man following us—the ferret-faced man from the museum, I now saw—hesitated to come in, put off no doubt by the entrance fee.
There must have been forty or fifty men in the tent, filling half the benches. The boxing ring was a crude affair, just four posts driven into the ground joined by some stout rope with sawdust over the muddy ground.
A big, bearded man who could have been Russian or Turkish sat scowling on a stool in one corner. His cape was not drawn fully about him, and he had as much hair on his body as a bear. It did not disguise how flabby he was. Fairground boxers did not need to be athletes, but he looked right out of condition. Two other boxers, neither of them close to their prime, were having a low-voiced conversation with the seated man.
In the other corner was a knot of excited young men, one of them with his shirt off and his friends lacing up the boxing gloves for him. He looked far more athletic than his opponent, with a good set of muscles on him and a decent reach. He might have been boxing champion at his school or in his platoon, but he would need more than that to escape a beating. Carnival fighters were old pros and full of tricks to catch out an amateur. They also weighted their gloves while the challenger might find his gloves lighter than regulation. And they could get in plenty of low blows without the referee paying any heed—a referee whose count was faster or slower depending who he was counting for.
The barker, easily recognised by his scarlet waistcoat, was conferring at a side table with the ticket seller.
“You’re just in time, gentlemen—sixpence each. Take any seat you like.”
“As a matter of fact, we were seeking participation rather than observation,” said Skinner.
The barker’s smile fell when he saw me. “No, no,” he said, raising a hand. “No professionals. It’s strictly against the rules.”
“Rules?” asked Skinner mildly. “A guinea for the man who can last three minutes in the ring—that’s what it says on the board outside. There ain’t no small print on it.”
The barker looked again at Skinner. “Here, don’t I know you?”
“Our paths may have crossed,” said Skinner. “And I don’t recall owing you any favours. Harry, go see if they’ve got gloves big enough for you.”
The boxers were looking round at that point. I was being sized up. I stood to attention and looked coolly back at them then cracked a knuckle.
“No professionals,” insisted the barker.
“My friend may be a past master in the noble art, but that’s nothing to you,” said Skinner, arms folded. “And you know how much the flatties like to see a real fight. They’ll be very disappointed if I tell them you won’t allow it.”
Skinner had a shrewd understanding that the crowd would take his side and that the barker would be barracked at best. At worst, the crowd might start demanding their money back or damaging the place.
The barker scowled. “What do you want?”
Skinner looked at the ticket seller’s wooden box with its slots for coins of different denominations. “My friend is very partial to a pint or three, and we couldn’t help noticing the beer tent back there. Maybe a drink would soothe the disappointment of not getting a match.”
The barker practically growled at this extortion, but he was first and foremost a pragmatic man. He wordlessly held up two shillings.
“Your very good health, Mr Hanson, sir,” said Skinner brightly, touching his forefinger to his hat brim. “Harry, follow me to the pavilion of foaming tankards!”
We left quickly through the side entrance reserved for the boxers. Nobody stopped us. We were walking fast, turning and turning again and weaving through the crowd. A roar from behind us announced that the bout had started. We had left our pursuer outside the main entrance to the boxing tent, probably not wanting to part with sixpence. He had not seen our premature exit. And if he should ask, they would probably direct him to the beer tent.
Once we were well clear, Skinner stopped and broke into laughter, which was lost in the swirl of carnival noise. “Did you see old Freddie’s face? Did you? What a glorious piece of business that was,” he said, chuckling. “I owed him that.”
“For a minute, I thought you were serious about me getting in the ring.”
“What, let Freddie see his man take a beating, and lose a guinea into the bargain? Not likely. We could have got twice as much from the old skinflint.” He pressed the coins into my hand. “Here you go, Harry. Money well earned. Buy yourself a toffee apple for starters.”
“A grown man can’t walk around eating a toffee apple.”
“Get two of them, and I’ll show you how it’s done. Go on. He’s selling them over there. That’s an order, Bombardier Stubbs!”
We walked on down a row of sideshows, each of us chewing a sticky, crispy delicacy. I had not had a toffee apple for longer than I could remember; at some point, it had sta
rted to seem childish. Now the toffee apple felt like a small act of defiance against the world, and a very sweet and juicy act at that.
The main thing with a toffee apple is not to let it fall off the stick and be ruined. The sticks can be a bit haphazard. The makers of toffee apples do not take all the trouble they should, especially considering how many of their customers are small children who can be mortified by the loss of their sweet. The sight of us both earnestly nibbling made passers-by smile, and I smiled back.
Skinner paused to explain the economics of coconut shies. The secret was that coconuts could be bought wholesale for less than the penny that people paid for the chance to win one. Therefore, the game did not need to be as difficult as many of the other games though the use of hollow wooden balls meant that even a direct hit might not be sufficient to dislodge one.
“Now then,” said Skinner. “That’s where we’re headed. Just let them finish leaving.”
At first I thought he meant the Torture exhibition, which offered a display of instruments of torture and execution down through the ages with the aid of waxworks. Then, as we went past, I saw that the next tent down was our destination.
“Everett’s Wonders of The Natural World” read the placard. “Nature’s Most Astounding Freaks—You Will Be AMAZED.”
Everett boasted a five-legged sheep, a two-headed snake—“both heads deadly poisonous”—a Fiji mermaid, and a variety of other stuffed and preserved specimens as well as the living Horror of Horrors, for which there was an additional charge.
I had seen carnival freak shows before. I expressed the view that while they might be sufficient to impress small children and the poorly educated, in these days of cinema newsreels they had to be struggling to keep up. Once all of us had seen a real duck-billed platypus, it wasn’t enough to stitch together some random arrangement of animal parts.
“With this type of show, it’s all in the patter,” Skinner told me between bites of apple. “You don’t just put the audience in a front of a cage and let them look. You have curtains over the cage, and you build it up and get the anticipation going about how monstrous it is. And don’t have too much lighting—keep it shadowy and suggestive. Let their imagination do the work, and feed it. And if you have a female accomplice to shriek and faint when it’s uncovered, you’ll get them all at it.”
“You certainly know the carnival world.”
“Ah, here we are.” Skinner tossed his apple aside and darted forward as a man stepped from a side entrance of the freak-show tent. Everett, the show’s proprietor, had a shaved head, wore a sort of black military uniform with a lot of silver braid, and carried a short swagger stick. The uniform was heavy; I sweated just to look at it. He bent down to splash water from a bucket over his face and head, and Skinner approached as he was wiping himself with a towel.
“Hullo, Bertie. You still joggering, then?”
“Well, if it isn’t old Stinker,” said Everett, not unfriendly but wary. He spoke with a Northern accent. “Who’s this with you?”
“Harry’s a pal—business partner.” Skinner offered Everett our business card. “Business partner. And for business reasons, we wanted to get a dekko at your star attraction.”
Everett glanced at the card but did not take it. He clearly did not trust Skinner.
“Business reasons,” said Everett. “Time’s money. I don’t give free looks, but you can come in if you pay, same as the rest.”
I still had coins jingling in my pocket and passed over the requisite amount.
Everett took us inside. His displays were laid out inside the tent in a spiral. We passed the dim-lit alcoves—bright lighting was not a feature of freak shows—and came to the last one. That was behind a door, a peculiar fixture for a tent, secured with an outsize padlock and chain and plastered with lurid warning signs. Beyond was the Horror of Horrors.
For some reason, it made me think of Pierce in his cellar room.
“This is one-hundred-percent genuine,” said Everett, tapping the door with his swagger stick. “This isn’t a rigger; it’s the real thing. What I usually do is I invite one of them to go first for free—some raklo who thinks he’s seen it all and jeers at the other displays. When he comes out shuddering and gibbering, his friends just have to see what it is.”
“And what is it?” I asked.
Everett undid the padlock. “Like no living thing you have ever seen before. You won’t be happier for seeing it,” he warned. “And remember what I tell all of my customers: what has once been seen cannot ever be unseen. You enter here at your peril.”
“It’s all in the warm-up,” Skinner told me.
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Behind the door was a small room, empty but for a table on which stood an object the size of a breadbasket covered by a black cloth. Everett poked his stick under the edge of the cloth, as though not wanting to get too close, and whisked the cover away with a dramatic swish.
“Behold the lagomorph,” he said.
Underneath the cover was a wooden cage or hutch half-filled with straw. Something stirred inside, moving towards the wire mesh at the front.
I cannot describe what made it so repulsive, not in simple terms. It had four limbs in the right places, and it was symmetrical like any other animal. Nothing about it was especially monstrous, taken in isolation. A picture, even a photograph, would not have seemed particularly malformed. But in the way it moved, more in the way it looked at you, there was something that was not at all like any normal animal. The strangeness was in the way that every expectation was subverted.
The shock it gave was akin to looking into a crib and expecting to see a baby and instead finding a bloody aborted foetus—one that moved and lived and looked up with accusing eyes and worked its lips to speak to you.
A small nose and dark eyes gazed out at us through the wire mesh. I caught a glimpse of teeth, odd teeth like some mad carpenter’s tools, and something made me look away suddenly before I saw its tongue.
Maybe all of it boiled down to this: the way it looked at us was so disquieting. Like no animal should ever look at you. The rest of it was perhaps incidental. I couldn’t say, really, what it was, but the sight was so vile it seemed to imprint an after-image inside my eyeballs.
I heard Skinner catch his breath.
“You believe me now, don’t you?” said Everett with grim pride. He replaced the cloth without looking at what was underneath. “This little monster is the reason I’m still in business. A real earner.”
My sight felt as though it was stained. I wanted to look on clean things, on green fields and clouds and animals and people without deformity, and let the images wash my vision clean until everything was back to how it should be again.
It was incredible that such a thing would be on show, but the economic facts of life meant that people would take advantage of whatever they could. Madam Hester needed money, and any freakish animal was valuable to the proprietor of such a display. Skinner had correctly assumed that the cause of the water would lead to the effect showing up in Everett’s tent.
“The only question is exactly where you got it from,” said Skinner.
“My little secret,” said Everett tapping his nose.
“We can pay.”
Skinner contemplated a gold sovereign that had appeared in his palm.
Everett folded his arms, unmoved. He had told us that the monster was his livelihood, and the last thing he wanted was competition. The two men glared at each other for several seconds, neither wishing to be the first to break the silence.
“Madam Hester got it for you,” I said.
Everett said nothing and did not look away from Skinner.
“I’m afraid my colleague here failed to explain our purpose, Mr Everett,” I said. “We are not here for commercial motives. This is more of a humanitarian mission.”
Everett gave a short, mirthless laugh. I could understand why he would not associate Skinner with such a cause.
&nbs
p; Undaunted, I continued. “As you more than anyone can readily appreciate, this animal has undergone a horrible mutation from its natural form. It is not a normal sport of nature but a result of an alien influence, one that causes terrible modifications to living things. At present, it is confined to a single locality, but unless checked, it may become widespread.”
“What?” His head jerked around.
“At present, it is only affecting woodland creatures. If it spreads, it will be not just animals and birds and cats and dogs but people as well. There will be babies born like that thing in there, or worse, if we don’t stop it from going further.”
“How do you know? You’re not the proper authorities any more than I am. You’re not telling me he”—Everett jabbed a disrespectful thumb towards Skinner— “is working for the police.”
“Nevertheless,” I said, “if it means anything to you, you have my solemn word that we will not share the information, and it will not be used for any mercenary ends.”
He did not look convinced.
“This is a bad business,” I said. “I’ve seen a man struck by lightning and a woman reduced to ashes. And Madam Hester, the fortune teller—”
“What do you know about her?”
“She died because of this. Personally, I’d advise you destroy that creature in there and never mention it to anyone again. If we found you, others can too.”
Everett looked at me as though I was a dangerous madman.
“What is this?” he asked Skinner.
“More than I would have told you.”
Everett ran a hand over his shaved head. “I knew it was uncanny. But… what’s it to do with what happened to Madam Hester?”
“They want to keep the place secret,” I said. “Anyone who knows is in danger. That includes you.”
“And what’s it to do with you?”
“We have undertaken to ensure that matters are concluded safely,” I said. “No more deaths, and guilty parties brought to justice.”
I caught Skinner’s disbelieving look from the corner of my eye and ignored it. I had expected many more questions from Everett, but his mind did not work that way.
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 17