HIGH STRANGENESS-Tales of the Macabre

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  "I'm not listening to more of this rubbish." Davenport turned and began to trot away. He heard the laughter mocking him and turned back in a flash. He rushed to the window and beat on the glass with both fists. "I'll kill you, you two-headed freak bastard! I'll find you and kill you both!"

  The laughter rang now outwardly and inside Davenport’s mind. Both brothers emitted gales of laughter that forced Davenport to cover his ears and run for the exit before his eardrums burst.

  #

  The assistant held the flap for the last paid patron for the show, smiling gently at the scrawny girl who ducked to keep her hair from being mussed as she sailed under the flap and into the hallway. She walked slowly, hands held together at her waist, elbows jutting. She wore a stalwart look, her eyes frosty and unfathomable, just as if she owned the sideshow, the carnival, as if she owned the whole world.

  When she reached the glass, she stood still, her expression unchanging. "Hello, freak," she said, sarcasm dripping from her tinny voice.

  "Hello, dear." The smiling man inclined his fine head.

  Who are you calling a freak, you skinny, mean, murderous freak of a girl!

  The girl stiffened even more, her spine rigid. Her lips turned down and her eyes blazed. "What did you just say to me?"

  I called you a skinny. Mean. Murderous. FREAK.

  Now she knew for certain the voice was in her head and yet it was not her own. She stared at the lolling head and watched the saliva leak out and drip like white honey to the man's gray suit jacket that was already splotched with it.

  "Who are you?"

  I'm your worst nightmare, MaryBeth. I can read your blackened and pitted mind. I know you're fourteen years old. I know when you were twelve, you pushed your older brother off the edge of the subway into the path of a coming train. I know it was ruled an accident. It was the same with your older sister when you were thirteen and she was seventeen. They said she had a weak constitution. They said she had allergies to foods. They never did an autopsy, lucky for you, wasn't it, MaryBeth? She loved mushrooms, didn't she? So you found some yellow caps in the woods behind that looming mansion you live in and fed them to her. All to be sure you'd inherit the family fortune. All for your ambition, your greed, your...rage.

  "I'm leaving now." MaryBeth's checks were as rose red as if she were a rouged doll. She twisted away from the glass, but before she could hurry from the exhibit, the voice in her head shouted at her.

  You should wait. You're the one I mean to tell the future.

  She froze and turned her head on her skinny neck to stare through the glass. The smiling man moved closer to the window, but she refused to be intimidated. She stood her ground, seething.

  "You don't know the future. You're just a dumb freak playing a little game. I wouldn't even trouble to spit on you if you passed me in the street. You're garbage they forgot to take out. You're the fetus they neglected to abort. You're nothing and I'm not afraid of you. Either of you."

  Not afraid? You will be, MaryBeth, just give it a little time. You see, I brought all of you in here. I created your desire and curiosity. I brought in a woman who kills her many husbands for insurance money. I brought a church deacon who is a cat burglar and sexual pervert. I brought in an escaped convict who committed murder and now robs little old ladies. And just before you, I brought a madman who is an imposter doctor. He gets his jollies by injecting unsuspecting patients so they die ugly, unnecessary deaths.

  "Worse than me!" MaryBeth made a move to leave again. "What do I care?"

  Not one of them are worse than you, not a single one.

  "How can you say that? They've killed too. They’re mad criminals, insane people, and murderers."

  It’s true, they are, but your ambition is unrestrained, MaryBeth. It's so strong, it's the most dangerous of all obsessions, don't you think? You were willing to kill family. You turned on your own blood. You weren't born with a conscience. Your heart is blackest of all, black as a cave deep in a mountain, black as the outer void beyond the universe.

  "You are nothing but a ridiculous freak. I don't have to believe a word you say. This is all a setup, some kind of trick. Now back off."

  For the third time she turned to go, holding her bony shoulders back, her chin up, her head high.

  They will exhume your sister, MaryBeth. Your father suspects you. He's not as unobservant as you think. You're going to get caught, locked up, and you won't get out of prison until you are a very old woman. They will try you as an adult.

  This time MaryBeth kept walking, her head high, her mind shut against the warning.

  She exited the tent and hurried to find her father where she had left him on the midway looking for her while she had sneaked into the sideshow.

  #

  It was only days later the circus freak’s prediction came true. Her father braced her with questions she tried to answer, but he kept interrupting her excuses, accusing her of wrongdoing. He said, "I knew something was wrong, MaryBeth. You're the only one I confided in about my terminal condition. You knew I hadn't long to live. You hated your brother and sister, didn't you? Didn't you! If your mother were alive, she would die of horror at what you've become."

  MaryBeth ran to her room, weeping crocodile tears. Once behind her door she began to plot.

  #

  It was hours later, night engulfing the quiet mansion in shadow, when MaryBeth crept down the stairs to make sure her father was asleep in bed. It was true, she decided, what the sideshow monster had told her about the future. Her father's suspicions were at their highest peak ever and even if it meant his fortune would have to be left to charity, he was sure to bring her to justice for her crimes. That was the kind of father fate had saddled her with in this dreary, horrible life. Not only was she the youngest child, she was indisputably the ugliest. Not only had her siblings been brilliant, they had also been beautiful. She hated them with a passion from early childhood and that passion burned bright as a dying star. If she had it all to do over again, she would still find a way to murder them.

  She left the stairs and tiptoed into her father's library. She went to the secret panel and the safe there. She would have to take as much cash as he had stashed and disappear before the exhumation. For although he hadn't threatened it, she knew he would come around with the idea it had to be done, if only to satisfy his suspicions. She would have to start a new life before he went that far. She cursed her father, cursed her destiny. Why couldn't anything ever go her way? Her father was dying. Her siblings were dead. She was all the family left to take over and run her father's multimillion dollar businesses. Why had life sabotaged her this way, ruining every plan she made?

  As she was fiddling with the flashlight and reaching for the combination lock, she felt a sudden, sharp pain in her left scapula that caused her to almost pass out. She swayed on her feet, dropped the flashlight, and held onto the wood panel door to keep from fainting outright. Oh God, she thought, what's happening? Am I having a heart attack?

  She bit down on her lower lip. As the pain passed, she stumbled in the dark to chase the flashlight that had rolled a few feet away. When she bent to retrieve it, another sharp pain brought her to her knees. She reached for her shoulder and pressed down, trying to bar the pain. She gasped. She felt an ominous knot and, in the darkness, her eyes grew wide in fear. She got hold of the flashlight, twisted her head and aimed the bright white beam on her shoulder. She pushed back the collar of her blouse. She saw it now. The knot was no knot at all. It was a tiny...

  …head.

  She clenched shut her eyes, then opened them again, hoping to find it gone. No, she thought, no-no-no-no. A cold shot of adrenalin forged through her body like a ship steaming full throttle across a placid ocean. Her vision was clear, her mind blankly open in fascination. There was no hair on the tiny head, just a skull covered with her taut skin. The miniature face was misshaped, the nose flattened to one side, the lips hanging open on raw gums, the little eyes closed against the world. Even as sh
e stared, dumbfounded, the head grew, stretching against the skin and muscles of her body, inching forth into the world. She saw the beginning of a neck, the tendons tightly coiled, stretching, arching.

  Hello, MaryBeth. Can we be friends?

  The shock of the new voice inside her head traveled through her body, shaking her to her very depths. She dropped the flashlight and screamed.

  #

  Enveloped in a giant black hoodie, the skinny blond girl crept around the tents of the sideshow. She could hear the announcer inside introducing the acts.

  She passed by the carnival barker counting his proceeds from the crowd inside, and turned the corner of the tent. High overhead a full moon rode a gray cloudless sky, tracking her with shadow. Beneath her feet the gravel wheezed as she stepped forward. The scent of donuts fried in pots of hot grease made her stomach turn. She found the flap and pushed inside, shutting out the noise and babble of the midway.

  The hall was dark. She made her way by putting both hands on the canvas and following it until her fingers touched cold glass.

  "Are you there?" she whispered.

  Light suddenly flooded the small enclosure behind the glass and the smiling two-headed man stood there as if he had been waiting ever since she had left days before.

  "Hello, there, we're glad you've come."

  "Shut up," she said. "Talk to me, dead head."

  Hello, MaryBeth. I knew you'd be back.

  She threw back the great black hood of her jacket and slipped it off her shoulders to let it fall to the sawdust floor. "Look at me." She glowered in fury. "Look what you've done."

  Next to MaryBeth's normal head sat a second one just the same size, the eyelids closed with eyeballs rolling, the mouth agape and dripping saliva onto her shirt.

  Oh, how beautiful you are!

  "Devil! Demon! Warlock! You put a curse on me. You've disfigured me!"

  I did no such thing. That's your evil, MaryBeth. That's your heart and your soul. That's your twin self, the one that has wanted to come out all of your young life-- and now it has. It was fueled by your mean spirit. It was born of your heartless ambition. I suppose it speaks to you, does it not? And is it wise, MaryBeth? We know it isn't really beautiful, not like your brother and sister were before a train dismembered one and a deadly mushroom poisoned the other. But, tell me, is it all you could ever want in a sibling?

  For the first time the girl revealed true emotion. She began to cry tears round and clear as thumb-nail diamonds. They rolled unchecked down her thin haggard cheeks. "What am I to do? What's going to happen to me?"

  "Welcome!" cried the smiling man, his grin as wide as the new moon.

  Yes, welcome, MaryBeth. Welcome to the sideshow. We can always use another freak exhibit. Maybe you can have a glass booth right next to us. Won't that be cozy?

  The girl leaned against the glass, defeated, and rested her forehead there. The second head, pulled forward, pressed against the glass as well. This new monstrosity said in a cheerful, knowing voice, I love the carnival. We can have our own quarters. We can talk to the normal looking freaks when they come by to gawk at us. We can plumb their souls and rend the darkness, spilling their secrets, all the dirty little secrets.

  The smiling man looked at the two heads pressed against his glass and clapped his hands in the kind of glee usually only gifted to little children or the senile elderly. "Are you going to stay? Do you want to stay? We would love you to stay!"

  "Shut up." MaryBeth wiped her sniffling nose and raised both heads so she could look beyond the glass at her future. "Just shut up, you babbling moron."

  The smiling head bobbed and beamed with goodwill, delighted with the girl and her sharp wit. He just loved his fellow freaks in the sideshow.

  And so do I, his brother said. And so do I. The more the merrier. There's never enough good freaks for the clientele. MaryBeth will be brilliant.

  MaryBeth pulled back her shoulders and tried to raise her head high. "I hope you live long and die in torture."

  How odd you say that, MaryBeth. I wish the very same for you.

  The smiling man smiled like a goon, the world spun on its axis, the stars burned and blinked, the moon rode high, and the carnival played on.

  THE END

  A RIP IN TIME

  by

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

  Cover art copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

  Angie hung onto the black iron bars in the window of the Bakerwane Asylum watching the street. She recognized the devil man the minute he hit town, mainly by his distinctive, eccentric steed. It was a fake palomino, all dolled up with copper plates covering its muscular hips, ropes of silver Mexican coins threaded through its mane, and a horse-like face with wide square teeth showing bone white in the unrelenting South Dakota sunlight. The horse trotted down the dusty street with a clank and a jingling of bells attached to its long tail, throwing shards of light before it. It was Dane all right, though she called him the devil man. Dane Whitehall, county sheriff, the man she would kill if she got the chance. It had been Dane, six months earlier, who had testified before the court that she was practicing Magick. He had witnessed it he said, insuring she’d be locked away for the public good.

  She wouldn’t know Magick if it stomped on her foot and called her Baby. What she did know was the little mechanical box she had hidden under her thin cotton mattress was as malevolent and destructive as a gear-studded hangman’s noose the town of Hot Spring, South Dakota used on murderers. If she could master the secret of the box’s inner works, if she could speak to the gears that drove it, she might be able to use it against the devil man, but there would be no Magick involved.

  “You!” she shouted out between the bars, pressing her face against the iron and frowning for all she was worth.

  Dane’s head snapped around and he reached to push back his leather hat to see who had called. When his gaze fell on the window and her face pressed there, he quickly glanced away, keeping his face forward.

  “You, I said! Don’t ignore me, I won’t be ignored. Did you catch your man? No? What kind of sheriff are you, anyway?” He had left town to chase a robber, but came back empty handed. All he knew how to catch were innocent women living on their own.

  The steed carried him past her and down to the livery four blocks distant. She tried, but she couldn’t mash her face into the bars enough to see him. She stepped back from the window, feeling exhausted and alone. How had it come to this? She had been the best Rough Rider the Barbary Express had ever employed. She could handle her nickel-plated .45 revolver like nobody’s business and many a bandit had found that out to his grief. She rode alone, needing no partner or escort, and she made her deliveries on time to far flung outposts where the steam rail couldn't go.

  Then she’d taken a tumble near Hot Spring, the cinches on her saddle breaking on one side, sending her sprawling down the banks of the river gulch just outside of town. She always checked the saddle, and she knew the cinches were worn, but she thought they’d last until she reached town. The fall had broken her right leg in two places, sending her to the harp specialist who discovered his instrument was useless to mend her. They had called in the surgeon. More like a scalpel hound dog was what he was, not even a real doctor. He cut and ripped and tore and left her maimed, that’s what he’d done. In recompense he’d given her the box, hoping to keep her quiet. The box, he said, was pretty, but to be truthful it had a little problem. “It may be haunted,” he’d said. “It came from an Indian out near Deadwood, paid his bill with it when I was practicing there, but ever since I’ve had it the blame thing keeps beeping and ticking like a clock. One time I think it spoke, but I’d had a few whiskeys, so don’t take that as gospel.”

  She had examined the box, admiring the nice mahogany sheen of the wood. A copper latch held it closed. When the lid was open the inside lay behind glass and the movements were splendid. It looked for all the world like a music box. Tiny gears meshed
perfectly, pins and wheels and chains moved in synchronization. “What’s its purpose?” she had asked the surgeon. Only then did she see he had backed away clear across the room, his hands in his pockets, sweat breaking out on his brow.

  “I don’t rightly know---that’s the thing. I just thought it was a fine handcrafted piece. You can have it. It belongs to a woman.”

  She bit down on her retort, but when she looked down at the box working away in her hands, she was so taken with it that his claim of haunting left her mind entirely. “I’ll take it,” she said. She looked up quickly and held him with a hard stare. “But I’m not going to pay you. Not for what you’ve done to me.” She lowered her legs over the side of the bed, her maimed leg encased in clear crystal, the knee held with brass pins. She painfully came onto her feet and now she really glared. “You shouldn’t be cutting on people, Doc. Anyone ever tell you that? I have no idea how I’m supposed to throw this leg over a horse’s back and get myself into a saddle again. I figure I’m ruined for the Barbary Express.”

  “Maybe you can get a job on the new high speed rail, like hosting in the salon or something…” His voice trailed off at her sneering face.

  “I wouldn’t get on one of those rail cars blasting across the plains if you broke my other leg!”

  She had taken the box and left the hospital, trundling down the wooden sidewalks while people stared. That was the first time the box spoke.

  “Don’t mind them. Thugs, the whole lot.”

  She halted in her tracks, swaying a bit on the balls of her feet to stay upright. She needed a crutch, or at the very least, a cane. She looked down at the strange little box and held her breath. “What kind of thing are you?” she asked.

  “Just the best thing ever happened to you.”

  “What are you meant to do?”

  “Give advice.” Then it was silent and would speak no more no matter how she tapped it and shook it and rattled it around.

  How she’d wound up in an asylum for the insane had some to do with the box’s talking and the giving of advice, but it had more to do with the shape-shifter who kept coming from…somewhere…and trying to take the box back. She had heard rumors of shape-shifters, but had never seen one before. It formed from out of the air, like fog or smoke, twirling madly. She had been in the hotel, resting in her room, worrying about what she was going to do with her ruined life when suddenly the air chilled to freezing and twirling in the center of the room the shape-shifter came shrouded as a giant wolf. She scooted up in the bed until her back was against the carved headboard. She might have shrieked.