by Ed Kurtz
what they saw
The picture cut to the startling image of an enormously obese woman dressed in nothing more than a two-piece bathing suit. She sat on a bed of hay behind iron bars and shook herself with all her might, causing her great folds of fat to wiggle and flop.
(Theodora said out loud: “Big Bertha,” because she remembered.)
Indeed, the title card that followed identified the gigantic woman as none other than big bertha, 450 lbs of pure woman.
Now at the next specimen, also behind bars, as all of them would be—a sorrowful looking creature with cracked, plated skin and no hair on her reptilian head. the crocodile woman. Next came the gruesome spectacle of a table laden with half a dozen jars in which vaguely humanoid shapes floated within murky liquid—pickled punks.
In quick succession the bizarre parade went on like this. A bearded lady in a ballet costume performed a pirouette; a pair of Siamese twins played a game of chess; the Lobster Boy sipped tea, perilously gripping the handle of the teacup between the two malformed digits that extended from his wrist. There was a shuddering pig with one bulbous black eye in the centre of its head and a deformed man with a jutting brow and tumorous jaw billed simply as ape or man?
The penultimate freak on display was the armless fiddler, a small coloured man who played his fiddle with his feet—without the benefit of sound, his skill was unknowable.
At last the tour concluded with its pièce de résistance—
jo-jo the dog-faced boy!
savage abomination!
nature’s worst mistake!
Recoiling from his onlookers, the boy-thing masked his face with shaggy hands. He bared his teeth and seemed to growl even as he savagely snapped at the inquisitive camera that filmed him. It was a furious and terrified brute, worthy of both sympathy and horror.
A sharp cut shifted the focus to the spectators, among whom the drag and blacked-up Anne wailed and waved her arms over her head in a histrionic fit.
“laws, laws!
dat ain’t natchrel!
dat be de debbil’s bidniss!”
(Theodora groaned. She recalled the words and her nanny’s reaction, but bristled at the silent picture’s parody of it. Worse still, it was entirely out of context: as Theodora remembered it, it was not fear of the poor boy that ignited Anne’s outrage, but rather the showman’s treatment of him. But then the man on screen was not the barker she saw that day—the man on the herky-jerky, flickering screen, of course, was Barker Davis.)
The child largely ignored her nanny’s hamming theatrics; she was too entranced with the hirsute boy in the cage. She gingerly approached the bars, equally ignored by the grown-ups, and reached a chubby pink arm between them. At first, the boy—Jo-Jo—did nothing but continue to cringe and growl. The girl did not understand he did this only to appease his handler, that he was in no way the savage abomination he was said to be. To her mind, this undreamed-of creature was every bit the brute the barker claimed, an understanding that only served to make her gesture so much more extraordinary. The dog-faced boy turned his huge brown eyes from the kind-faced girl to the barker and the nanny and the startled observers who observed one another, and not him. His growling tapered off. His heaving breaths slowed to gentler inhalations and exhalations. He looked deeply at the girl-child, the fortunate kid who had hair where hair was expected to be, who got to wear clothes and visit stinking roadside circuses only to peek and then go back home. He cocked his head to one side—unintentionally and comically dog-like—and let loose a whimper that elicited fresh tears from the girl on the other side of the bars.
A miracle happened then. In her empathy and grief, the girl swooned and dropped backward, still grasping the cold iron bars. . . .
And the cage door swung open with her.
The boy gasped and threw a hairy hand to his mouth to muffle the sound. Apart from the girl, no one seemed to notice; the grown-ups had directed Anne to the far opposite corner of the tent to sit her down and fan her face. The girl threw a quick glance in that direction. While her head was turned, the boy darted out of the cage, knocking over a bucket that slopped shit all over the hay in his wake. The bucket clanged against the hard ground underneath and the open bars, jarring the girl back to attention and alerting everyone else inside the tent. Anne screamed. The barker shouted a blue streak of profanity. The dog-faced boy shrieked like a banshee, scrabbling alongside the row of freaks on display.
The crocodile woman wept, her scaly face buried in her scaly hands, but the armless fiddler and Big Bertha raised a chorus of alarmed shouts to catch him, catch him. The girl gave chase, the adults close behind. The pounding ruckus of a dozen or more scrambling feet jarred the insubstantial cages, shook the pickled punks until one of the larger ones toppled over and smashed to pieces. (The smell was overwhelming; she remembered it so clearly she could very nearly smell it now. Rot and sewage; those damn things were real, for God’s sake.)
Catch him, catch him.
They didn’t. Despite his starved appearance and short legs, the little beast outran them all, clear out of the tent and into the dusty yellow sun. Stark naked and looking the way he did, there was no telling how far he might have gotten, where he may have gone—but it was a moot point. For what his keepers and unfortunate brethren failed to do was accomplished with seemingly effortless ease by a reedy man with a pointed beard in a wrinkled suit.
Black Harry Ashford swept the panicked youth up with one arm and whispered into his fur-hidden ear:
each of us has his cage—
be grateful for yours!
And after the pursuing mob caught up and Barker Davis commenced beating the Dog-Faced Boy and the little girl bellowed silently at her disinterested nanny, the picture cut abruptly to a wide shot of Theodora in her kitchen, weeping over a mess of overcooked potatoes on the floor.
The startling image was intercut with a new title:
theodora in her cage.
Chapter Thirteen
Deputy Dean Mortimer’s midnight show was considerably less complex.
He saw the magician (“black” harry ashford; magician—illusionist—entertainer; master of mystery) performing marvellous feats of sorcery upon his little stage, feats much more impressive than any magician he’d ever seen before. Mortimer had seen, for example, Earl Child’s numerous card tricks many a night at Earl’s tavern, and he’d seen a magician at the Litchfield Autumn Fair twist balloons into animal shapes and even make a farmer’s wife disappear in a trick cabinet. Nothing the man on the Palace’s screen did, however, could possibly have been a trick.
Mortimer understood the basic rudiments of special effects, that film producers were perfectly capable of making it look like the impossible was taking place before the audience’s very eyes, and yet when Harry Ashford began yanking the long, writhing black snake from somewhere beneath his velvet coat, the deputy knew he was seeing something quite special. More special still was the moment the magician brought the thrashing head of the serpent up to his mouth and gobbled the head up, an exploit outdone only by the continued consumption of the squirming snake, all four feet of it, clear up to the tail. For a fleeting moment the tip of the tail, glinting like onyx, lashed between the magician’s moving lips. Mortimer watched with equal parts horror and delight as Ashford’s throat muscles worked, clamping down on the unhappy reptile and pushing in down, down into whatever devilish machinery Ashford had for guts. The tail vanished with a slurp and the magician grinned, sated.
All in one, unmoving shot. No trick.
Somewhere, distant hands came together in applause, though no one in the auditorium clapped and the noise did not originate from the speakers, which emitted only tinny organ music to accompany the silent picture. Mortimer presumed it was somebody in the lobby, beyond the red doors, and dismissed it entirely. They were not applauding Ashford, whoever they were, though the deputy figured they damn well ought to have been. He was fantastic, this silent
film sorcerer, the real thing. It never even occurred to Mortimer that magic was illusion, by definition unreal; at least it was before he set foot in the Palace that night. That such a monumental change had occurred to the way he perceived the world around him was inconsequential to Dean Mortimer. Only Ashford’s magic mattered.
Now the performer strutted back and forth on the little stage, searching his unseen audience with black eyes. He waved his arms expansively and spoke to the camera—
I shall now need a volunteer
Before he could absorb the ridiculousness of his response, Mortimer vaulted an arm into the air and waggled his fingers. He even let out a muted squeak in his excitement.
Ashford twisted his neck to take in one side of the screen and then swung his head around to the other side. His nostrils flared and his eyes rolled back before snapping back into a direct stare at the camera—at Mortimer.
You there, he mouthed.
Mortimer let out a tiny gasp and let his arm down slowly.
Come, the magician’s lips said soundlessly. Don’t be afraid. Come on up, now.
The deputy rose from his seat and stepped into the lighted, red-carpeted aisle. The seat sprang shut in his wake, slapping loudly as it folded up. He did not hear it as he moved guardedly toward the screen.
“That’s right,” Ashford said, curling an index finger at Mortimer. Somehow the magician had found his voice, which sounded thin and crackly like paper. “Step right up.”
The relative warmth of the auditorium abandoned Mortimer as he approached the screen and stepped up onto the stage. He did not feel cold; merely grey.
“Right this way.”
“I—I’m nervous,” Mortimer stammered.
“No need, my boy. No need. Here—” Ashford drew a long, thin knife from his coat and presented it to Mortimer “—take this.”
He accepted the grey-silver knife by its black handle and regarded its winking edge and surprising heft. Ashford bowed slightly at the waist and showed grey teeth in a black mouth framed by a plaster white face. The sudden dearth of colour did not alarm Mortimer; rather, it comforted him, made things much simpler. He hoped at that moment to never see colour again. It was, more or less, how he had always viewed the world anyway.
“Now . . .” Ashford said, trailing off as he went hunched over to a long, narrow table at the edge of the stage.
Mortimer followed him, squinting in the stage lights at the curious symbols expertly carved into the surface of the table. None of them were remotely recognizable, though beautiful to look at, the centrepiece in particular—an upside-down triangle pointing at an ornate capital V, curlicues sweeping out on both sides and a pair of lines slicing through the shape on top.
“The Sigil of Lucifer,” the magician explained. “But look.”
He swept a dark sheet up from the floor and let it drift over the table, covering it completely. Mortimer shielded his eyes with his free hand and tightened his grip on the knife’s handle with the other. This way, he could make out the shadowy forms of the people in the scant audience, the people in the dark theatre with whom he had been sitting only a moment before. He felt embarrassed, a little like being naked, but also vaguely superior.
Ashford made a dramatic show of opening up one side of his coat, the same side from which he’d taken first the snake and then the knife. From the bottomless inside pocket stitched into the lining, he drew out a long, thin wand of the type stage magicians nearly always used. Mortimer smiled childishly and cooed like a pigeon. With the deputy enthusiastically looking on, Ashford leaned over the table and drew a circle in the air with the wand, first clockwise and then counter-clockwise. Satisfied with this, he returned the wand to the pocket and spread his long, grey hands out over the sheet, which shifted and bulged like a bladder filling with water. In seconds the sheet took the general form of a human body, prone as a corpse. Mortimer gaped.
“Go ahead, Dean,” Ashford said. “Lift the sheet and see what I have done.”
The deputy hopped at the chance to oblige the magician; he grabbed handfuls of the sheet and yanked it away from the table as quickly as he could. The mischievous, boyish smile melted from his face when his foggy mind registered the face on the person beneath.
“Mama?”
His mother, two decades dead, lay in state just as she had on the day of her funeral, apart from the fact that she was utterly naked. Her skin was marbled and grey, her cheeks taut and receded to the point of her cheekbones protruding through. Though she had been divested of the lovely powder blue dress her sisters agonized over in the days leading up to the viewing, the late Mrs. Mortimer retained her pearl earrings and ruby red hummingbird brooch, which for lack of cloth was pinned to the dry, shrunken flesh of her breast.
Dean Mortimer sniffed, touched and not a little puzzled by the conjuration of his deceased mother.
“That . . . that’s my mama,” he said.
Ashford nodded and moved his lips, but he made no sound. Mortimer beetled his brow and shifted his eyes from his mother to the magician and back again. Now the corpse’s lips were slightly parted and a weak, wheezing breath whistled out. The magician laid a gentle hand on Mortimer’s shoulder and continued to speak without sound. Shaking his throbbing head, the deputy leaned in close, aimed his ear at Ashford’s mouth which whispered almost inaudibly, “For her, Dean. Do it for Mama.”
“What? Do what for her?”
Ashford covered his mouth with one hand and looked away, sad and ashamed. With a shuddering gasp, Mortimer jerked his head back around to see Sheriff Ernie Rich, his own nude flesh markedly white in contrast to Mrs. Mortimer’s dull grey, pounding his rump up and down as he defiled the cadaver on the table. Mortimer screamed mournfully and shook like a drunk with the DTs for several seconds before he could persuade his body to take action.
“Not my mama,” he moaned, launching himself at the slobbering man rutting his mother’s body. “Not my mama, Ernie, goddamn you!”
“You must protect her,” Ashford hissed. “You must protect mama.”
Mortimer threw himself at Rich, piling into his boss’s naked body and knocking him off the table. Rich groaned and slammed against the stage floor. He instinctively cupped his genitals with one hand and flailed the other, balled into a fist, at his deputy.
“What kinda man,” Mortimer sobbed as he stamped around the table, “what kinda man . . .”
“She still looks good to me, Deano,” Rich said breathlessly, his stark white lips curling back into a nasty grin. “You can have her, too. We all can.”
“Kill you,” Mortimer snarled. “Kill . . . you!”
“The knife, Dean,” Ashford kindly reminded him.
He had forgotten all about it, but the blade still gleamed in his hand. Mortimer grunted and gripped the handle with both hands as he lunged for Ernie Rich. The sheriff screeched and recoiled on his side. Mortimer saw that the man’s penis was still erect and glistening in the stage lights.
“You can’t keep her buried, Dean,” Rich sobbed.
Mortimer brought the blade down hard, driving it into the sheriff’s side and pushing it through his ribs. Black blood bubbled up from wound, slid down in viscous rivulets across his back and belly. Rich coughed wetly, jerked in a single violent spasm, and disappeared.
“What is this?” Mortimer cried, leaping to his feet with the still dripping knife in his hand. “A trick?”
“I do not do tricks, Dean,” Ashford said reproachfully.
Mortimer scanned the stage; his breath hitched when he saw that his mother was also gone. Now only the strange, indecipherable shapes remained on top of the table.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Isn’t it time, Dean Mortimer? Isn’t it time to finally assert yourself, to finally be a man? Why, your poor, dear mother lies in rest, unaware of the obscene intentions of men like Ernie Rich. And that is
to say nothing of the Reverend Jim Shannon.”
“Reverend Shannon? What’s he got to do with anything?”
The magician laughed: an abrupt snort. “Only everything, Dean,” he said with a flourishing gesture of his hands. “Only absolutely everything.”
Chapter Fourteen
Margie and Scooter each had their own midnight shows, as well. In Scooter’s, Captain America burst into Hitler’s secret bunker with his shield in one hand and the severed, dripping head of a Japanese soldier in the other. The Führer’s goons opened up with machine guns that went rat-a-tat-tat-tat, but their bullets were useless against the hero’s impenetrable shield. Scooter gaped, utterly thrilled, as the colourful hero hurled the Jap’s frowning head at the brown-uniformed Nazi guards and then set upon them with savage force, caving in one’s skull with his great, gloved fist and crushing another’s throat with the edge of his shield. In no time there was no one left in the bunker apart from hero and villain, a result at which Captain America laughed uproariously while Adolph Hitler wept with despair and fear.
Scooter laughed too when his hero tore Hitler’s right arm out of the socket, leaving only dangling red strips of seeping tissue, and then repeated the procedure with the Nazi leader’s other arm, and then both legs. Now merely a brown-coated torso with a shrieking, babbling head, Hitler begged for death. Except it was not Adolph Hitler at all, as Scooter previously thought, but Margie’s father, the Reverend, who screeched at the hero, mad with pain and agony.
That’s strange, Scooter thought. I didn’t know the rev was a Nazi. That ain’t no good.
And when Captain America removed his mask to stare down his nemesis during the latter’s last moments of life, Scooter was pleased as punch to realize that the hero was himself.
Brimming with emotion, Margie Shannon fought back tears while she watched the story of her life performed by dolls. They were not at all like her old dolls in the attic, with frilly little dresses and pink cheeks and blonde curls; these dolls were ugly in their simplicity, poorly stitched together and entirely lacking any identifying features. Also unlike Margie’s childhood playthings, the dolls on screen moved all on their own.