Rod blinked at him.
"Want me to spell it out for you? Three seasons ago, just before you came with the show, fella name of Richey was boss canvasman. Mighty nice guy, but he had a problem—he was scared of snakes. Babe Flynn was working them, had a bunch of constrictors, all standards for her act and harmless as they come. But Richey had such a thing about snakes he wouldn't even go near her wagon.
"Where he went wrong was, he went near Madame Sylvia's Wagon. Cora was pretty young then, just budding out you might say, but that didn't stop Richey from making his move. Nothing serious, only conversation. How the old lady found out about it I don't know and how she found out he was spooked on snakes I don't know either, because he always tried to hide it, of course.
"But one afternoon, last day of our stand in Red Clay it was, Madame Sylvia took a little walk over to Richey's trailer. He was standing outside, shaving, with a mirror hung up on the door.
"She didn't say anything to him, didn't even look at him—just stared at his reflection in the mirror. Then she made a couple of passes and mumbled something under her breath and walked away. That's all there was to it.
"Next morning, Richey didn't show up. They found him lying on the floor inside his trailer, deader'n a mackerel. Half his bones were broken and the way the body was crushed you'd swear a dozen constrictors had been squeezing his guts. I saw his face and believe me it wasn't pretty."
Rod's voice was husky. "You mean the old lady set those snakes on him?"
Basket Case shook his head. "Babe Flynn kept her snakes locked up tight as a drum in her own trailer. She swore up and down nobody'd even come near them the night before, let alone turned 'em loose. But Richey was dead. And that's what I mean about the double whammy."
"Look." Rod was talking to Basket Case, but he wanted to hear it himself, too. "Madame Sylvia's just another mitt reader, peddling phoney fortunes to the suckers. All this malarkey about gypsy curses—"
"Okay, okay." Basket Case shrugged. "But if I were you I'd cut out of here, fast. And until I did, I wouldn't let that old lady catch me standing in front of a mirror."
"Thanks for the tip," Rod said.
As he walked away, Basket Case called after him. "See you at the funeral."
But Rod didn't go to the funeral.
It wasn't as if he was afraid or anything; he just didn't like the idea of standing at Cora's grave with everybody looking at him as if they knew. And they damned well did by now, all of them. Maybe it would be smart to ease out of here like Basket Case said, but not now. Not until he could pay off what he owed to Donahue. For the next three weeks he'd just sweat it out.
Meanwhile, he'd watch his step. Not that he believed that crazy story about the double whammy—Basket Case was just putting him on, it had to be a gag. But it never hurt to be careful.
Which is why Rod shaved for the evening performance that afternoon. He knew the old lady was at the funeral like everybody else; she wouldn't be creeping up behind him to capture his soul from his reflection in the mirror—
Damned right, she wouldn't!
Rod made a face at himself in the glass. What the hell was the matter with him, anyway? He didn't buy that bit about the curse.
But there was something wrong. Because for a moment when Rod looked into the mirror he didn't see himself. Instead he was staring into a black, grinning face, with bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes and a twisted mouth opening to show the yellow fangs.
Rod blinked and the face went away; it was his own reflection peering back at him. But his hand was shaking so that he had to put the razor down.
His hand was still shaking when he reached for the bottle on the top shelf, and he must have spilled more of the whiskey than he managed to get into the glass. So he took a slug straight from the bottle instead. And then another, until his hands were steady again. Good for the nerves, a little snort now and then. Only you had to watch that stuff, not let it run away with you. Because if you didn't pretty soon you got hooked and some day before you knew what was happening, you wound up in the wooly wig and the blackface, down there in the pit waiting for the white chicken—
The hell with that noise. It wasn't going to happen. Just a couple of weeks and he'd be out of here, no more carny, nothing to bug him ever again. All he had to do now was keep his cool and watch his step.
Rod watched his step very carefully that evening when he walked up to the bally platform and adjusted his mike for the pitch. Standing before the bloody banners he felt good, very good indeed, and the couple of extra belts he'd taken from the bottle just for luck seemed to have unwound that ball of fear inside his head. It was easy to make his pitch about the Strange People—"All there on the inside, folks, on the inside"—and watch the marks flocking around down below. The marks—they were the real freaks, only they didn't know it. Shelling out their dough to gawk at poor devils like Basket Case, then paying extra for the Special Added Attraction, Adults Only, in the canvas pit behind the ten-in-one tent. What kind of a pervert would pay money to see a geek? What was the matter with people like that?
And what was the matter with him? Standing there beside the pit, holding the burlap bag and feeling the chicken fluttering helplessly inside, Rod felt the fear returning to flutter within himself. He didn't want to look down into the pit and see the geek crouching there, growling and grimacing like a real wild man. So he looked at the crowd instead, and that was better. The crowd didn't know he was afraid. Nobody knew he was spooked, let alone what scared him.
Rod talked to the crowd, building his pitch, and his hands started to fumble with the cord around the neck of the burlap bag, getting ready to open it and dump the chicken into the pit.
And that's when he saw her.
She was standing over to one side, right up against the edge of the canvas; just a little old woman dressed in black, with a black shawl draped over her head. Her face was pinched, her skin was brown and leathery, wrinkled into a permanent scowl. An old lady, nobody gave her a second glance, but Rod saw her.
And she saw him.
Funny, he'd never noticed Madame Sylvia's eyes before. They were big and brown and staring—they stared right at him now, stared right through him.
Rod wrenched his gaze away, forced his fingers to open the sack. All the while, mechanically, he was talking, finishing the buildup as he reached for the chicken, pulled it out, flung the clucking creature down to that other creature in the pit—the creature that growled and grabbed and oh my God it was biting now—
He couldn't watch and he had to turn his head away, seeing the crowd again as they shrieked and shuddered, getting their kicks. And she was still standing there, still staring at him.
But now her clawlike hand moved over the rim of the canvas to extend a pointing forefinger. Rod knew what she was pointing at; she was pointing at the geek-pit. And the wrinkled face could change its expression, because she was smiling now.
Rod turned and groped his way out into the night.
She knew.
Not just about him and Cora, but about everything. Those eyes that stared at him and through him had also stared inside him—stared inside and found his fear. That's why she'd pointed and smiled; she knew what he was afraid of.
The Midway lights were bright, but it was darker behind the canvas sidewalls except where a patch of moonlight shone on the big water-barrel setting next to the cook-tent.
Rod's face was damp with sweat; he headed for the barrel and soaked his handkerchief in the water to wipe his forehead. Time for another pitch pretty soon, and the next show. He had to pull himself together.
The cool water helped to clear his head, and he dipped his handkerchief again. That was better. No sense flipping just because a nutty old dame gave him a dirty look. This business about gypsies and the evil eye and the double whammy was all a crock. And even if there was something to it, he wouldn't let her get to him. He wasn't about to stand in front of any mirrors—
Then he glanced down at the water in the barrel, saw hi
s features reflected in the moonlight shining there. And he saw her face, standing right behind him. Her eyes were staring and her mouth was mumbling, and now her hands were coming up, making passes in the air. Making passes like an old witch, she was going to turn him into a geek with the double whammy—
Rod turned, and that's the last thing he remembered. He must have passed out, fallen, because when he came to he was still on the ground.
But the ground was somehow different than the earth outside the tent; it was covered with sawdust. And the light was stronger, it was shining straight down between the canvas walls of the pit.
He was in the pit.
The realization came, and Rod looked up, knowing it was too late, she'd caught him, he was in the geek's body now.
But something else was wrong, too; the pit was deeper, the canvas walls much higher. Everything seemed bigger, even the blur of faces crowded around the sides of the pit way up above. Way up above—why was he so small?
Then his eyes shifted as he heard the growling. Rod turned and looked up again just in time to see the black grinning face looming over him, the giant mouth opening to reveal the rotting yellow teeth. It was only then that Rod knew what she had really done to him, as the huge hands grabbed out, pulling him close. For a moment he squawked and fluttered his wings.
Then the geek bit off his head.
THE SISTER CITY by Brian Lumley
This manuscript attached at "Annex 'A' " to report number M-Y-127/52, dated 7th Aug. 1952
Towards the end of the war, when our London home was bombed and both my parents were killed, I was hospitalized through my own injuries and forced to spend the better part of two years on my back. It was during this period of my youth—I was only seventeen when I left the hospital—that I formed, in the main, the enthusiasm which in later years developed into a craving for travel, adventure and knowledge of Earth's elder antiquities. I had always had a wanderer's nature but was so restricted during those two, dreary years that when my chance for adventure eventually came I made up for wasted time by letting that nature hold full sway.
Not that those long, painful months were totally devoid of pleasures. Between operations, when my health would allow it, I read avidly in the hospital's library, primarily to forget my bereavement, eventually to be carried along to those worlds of elder wonder created by Walter Scott in his enchanting Arabian Nights.
Apart from delighting me tremendously, the book helped to take my mind off the things I had heard said about me in the wards. It had been put about that I was different; allegedly the doctors had found something strange in my physical make-up. There were whispers about the peculiar qualities of my skin and the slightly extending horny cartilege at the base of my spine. There was talk about the fact that my fingers and toes were ever so slightly webbed; and being, as I was, so totally devoid of hair, I became the recipient of many queer glances.
These things plus my name, Robert Krug, did nothing to increase my popularity at the hospital. In fact, at a time when Hitler was still occasionally devastating London with his bombs, a surname like Krug, with its implications of Germanic ancestry, was probably more a hindrance to friendship than all my other peculiarities put together.
With the end of the war I found myself rich; the only heir to my father's wealth, and still not out of my teens. I had left Scott's Djinns, Ghouls and Efreets far behind me but was returned to the same type of thrill I had known with the Arabian Nights by the popular publication of Lloyd's Excavations on Sumerian Sites. In the main it was that book which was responsible for the subsequent awe in which I ever held those magical words: "Lost Cities."
In the months that followed, indeed through all my remaining—formative—years, Lloyd's work remained a landmark, followed as it was by many more volumes in a like vein. I read avidly of Layard's Nineveh and Babylon and Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. I dwelled long over such works as Budge's Rise and Progress of Assyriology and Burckhardt's Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.
Nor were the fabled lands of Mesopotamia the only places of interest to me. Fictional Shangri-La and Ephiroth ranked equally beside the reality of Mycenae, Knossos, Palmyra and Thebes. I read excitedly of Atlantis and Chichen-Itza, never bothering to separate fact from fancy, and dreamed equally longingly of the Palace of Minos in Crete and Unknown Kadath in the Cold Waste.
What I read of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith's African expedition in search of dead G'harne confirmed my belief that certain myths and legends are not far removed from historical fact. If no less a person than that eminent antiquarian and archaeologist had equipped an expedition to search for a jungle city considered by most reputable authorities to be purely mythological . . . Why! His failure meant nothing compared to the fact that he had tried . . .
While others, before my time, had ridiculed the broken figure of the demented explorer who returned alone from the jungles of the Dark Continent I tended to emulate his 'deranged fancies'—as his theories have been considered—re-examining the evidence for Chyria and G'harne and delving ever deeper into the fragmentary antiquities of legendary cities and lands with such unlikely names as R'lyeh, Ephiroth, Mnar and Hyperborea.
As the years passed my body healed completely and I grew from a fascinated youth into a dedicated man. Not that I ever guessed what drove me to explore the ill-lit passages of history and fantasy. I only knew that there was something spellbinding for me in the re-discovery of those ancient worlds of dream and legend.
Before I began those far-flung travels which were destined to occupy me on and off for four years, I bought a house in Marske, at the very edge of the Yorkshire Moors. This was the region in which I had spent my childhood and there had always been about the brooding moors a strong feeling of affinity which was hard for me to define. I felt closer to home there somehow—and infinitely closer to the beckoning past. It was with a genuine reluctance that I left my moors but the inexplicable lure of distant places and foreign names called me away, across the seas.
First I visited those lands that were within easy reach, ignoring the places of dreams and fancies but promising myself that later—later! ! !
Egypt, with all its mystery! Djoser's step-pyramid at Saggara, Imhotep's Masterpiece; the ancient mastabas, tombs of centuries-dead Kings; the inscrutably smiling Sphinx; the Sneferu pyramid at Meidum and those of Chephren and Cheops at Giza; the mummies, the brooding Gods . . .
Yet in spite of all its wonder Egypt could not hold me for long. The sand and heat were damaging to my skin which tanned quickly and roughened almost overnight.
. . . Crete, the Nymph of the beautiful Mediterranean . . . Theseus and the Minotaur; the Palace of Minos at Knossos . . . All wonderful—but that which I sought was not there.
Salamis and Cyprus, with all their ruins of ancient civilizations . . . each held me but a month or so. Yet it was in Cyprus that I learned of yet another peculiarity of my personality; my queer abilities in water . . .
I became friendly with a party of divers at Famagusta. Daily they were diving for amphorae and other relics of the past off-shore from the ruins at Salenica on the south-east coast. At first the fact that I could remain beneath the water three times as long as the best of them, and swim further without aid of fins or snorkel, was only a source of amazement to my friends; but after a few days I noticed that they were having less and less to do with me. They did not care for the hairlessness of my body or the webbing, which seemed to have lengthened, between my toes and fingers. They did not like the bump low at the rear of my bathing-costume or the way I could converse with them in their own tongue when I had never studied Greek in my life.
It was time to move on. My travels took me all over the world and I became an authority on those dead civilizations which were my one joy in life. Then, in Phetri, I heard of the Nameless City.
Remote in the Desert of Araby lies the Nameless City, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It was of this place that Abdul Alh
azred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his inexplicable couplet:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
My Arab guides thought I, too, was mad when I ignored their warnings and continued in search of that City of Devils. Their fleet-footed camels took them off in more than necessary haste for they had noticed my skin's scaly strangeness and certain other unspoken things which made them uneasy in my presence. Also, they had been nonplussed, as I had been myself, at the strange fluency with which I used their tongue . . .
Of what I saw and did in Kara-Shehr I will not write. It must suffice to say that I learned of things which struck chords in my subconscious; things which sent me off again on my travels—this time to seek Sarnath the Doomed in what was once the land of Mnar.
No man knows the whereabouts of Sarnath . . . and it is better that this remain so. Of my travels in search of the place and the difficulties which I encountered at every phase of my journey I will therefore recount nothing. Yet my discovery of the slime-sunken city, and of the incredibly aged ruins of nearby Ib, were major links forged in the lengthening chain of knowledge which was slowly bridging the awesome gap between this world and my ultimate destination. And I, bewildered, did not even know where or what that destination was!
For three weeks I wandered the slimy shores of the still lake which hides Sarnath and at the end of that time, driven by a fearful compulsion, I once again used those unnatural aquatic powers of mine and began exploring beneath the surface of that hideous morass.
That night I slept with a small figurine, rescued from the sunken ruins, pressed to my bosom. In my dreams I saw my mother and father—but dimly, as if through a mist—and they beckoned to me . . .
The next day I went again to stand in the centuried ruins of Ib, and as I was making ready to leave I saw the inscribed stone which gave me my first real clue. The wonder is that I could read what was written on that weathered, aeon-old pillar; for it was written in a curious cuneiform older even than the inscriptions on Geph's broken columns, and it had been pitted by the ravages of time.
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