A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Jack! Jack! It’s back! It’s gonna get me again!”

  She leaped and he caught her in his arms, holding her tight. She was quaking with fear.

  “What is it, Vicks? What’s the matter?”

  “The monster! The monster that took me to the boat! It’s here! Don’t let it get me!”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said soothingly in her ear. “No one can hurt you when I’m around.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gia hurrying toward them. He gently peeled Vicky off himself and transferred the child to her mother’s arms. Vicky immediately wrapped her arms and legs around Gia.

  “My God, what happened?” Gia said, her expression fluctuating between fear and anger.

  “She thinks she saw a rakosh.”

  Gia’s eyes widened. “But that’s—”

  “Impossible. Right. But maybe she saw something that looks like one.”

  “No!” said Vicky from where her face was buried against her mother’s neck. “It’s one of them! I know it is!”

  “Okay, Vicks,” Jack said, gently rubbing her trembling back. “I’ll check it out.” He nodded to Gia. “Why don’t you take her outside.”

  “We’re on our way. After what I’ve seen here, I wouldn’t be half surprised if she really had seen one.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Jack watched Gia slip through the crowd, carrying Vicky. When she was out of sight he turned and headed in the direction Vicky had come.

  Wouldn’t be half surprised myself, he thought.

  Not that there was a single chance in hell of one of Kusum’s rakoshi being alive. They’d all died last summer on the water between Governor’s Island and the Battery. He’d seen to that. His incendiary bombs had burned them all to a crisp in the hold of the ship that housed them. Of course there had been that one that had come ashore, the one he’d dubbed Scar-lip, but it had swum back out into the burning water and had never returned. The rakoshi were dead, all of them. The species was extinct.

  But if by some miracle one had survived, it might well be part of Ozymandias Oddities. Julio had given Jack the tickets last week, saying it was the weirdest show he’d ever seen. He hadn’t been kidding. Jack had never seen freaks like these. By definition freaks were supposed to be strange, but these folk went beyond strange into the positively alien. Jack hadn’t realized what the “oddities” would be. And the more he’d seen, the less comfortable he’d felt. The very idea of deformed people putting themselves on display repulsed him; it was demeaning; and those who paid to gawk seemed as demeaned as the freaks on display; maybe more so.

  But there was nothing sad or pathetic about these freaks. They were bizarre, frightening, and many seemed belligerently proud of their deformities, as if the people strolling the midway were the freaks.

  And maybe we are.

  Jack moved slowly, steadily through the press, glancing left and right at the little stages on which each freak was exhibited. There were animals—a two-headed cow, a five-legged goat—and human giants, dwarves, pinheads, and . . . others, less easily described. Next to a guy with tentacles for arms who called himself “Octoman” was an old circus cart with iron bars on its open side, one of the old cages on wheels once used to transport and display lions and tigers and such. The sign above it said “Man-Shark.” Jack noticed people leaning across the rope border; they’d peer into the cage, then back off with uneasy shrugs.

  This deserved a look.

  Jack pushed to the front of the crowd and squinted into the dimly lit cage. Something was there, slumped in the left rear corner, head down, chin on chest, immobile. Something huge, a seven-footer at least. Dark-skinned, manlike and yet . . . undeniably alien.

  Jack felt the skin along the back of his neck tighten as ripples of warning shot down his spine. He knew that shape. But that was all it was. A shape. So immobile. It had to be a dummy of some sort, or a guy in a rubber suit. A damn good suit. No wonder Vicky had been terrified.

  But it couldn’t be the real thing. Couldn’t be . . .

  Jack ducked under the rope and took a few tentative steps closer to the cage, sniffing the air. No stench. The one thing he remembered about the rakoshi was their stench, like rotting meat. Nothing like that here. He got close enough to touch the bars but didn’t. The thing was a damn good dummy. He could almost swear it was breathing. He whistled and whispered, “Hey you in there!” The thing didn’t budge. He rapped his ring on one of the iron bars. “Hey–!”

  Suddenly it moved, the eyes snapping open as the head came up, deep yellow eyes that almost seemed to glow. Imagine the offspring from a pairing of a giant gorilla with a mako shark. Hairless cobalt skin, hugely muscled, no neck worth mentioning, no external ears, narrow slits for a nose. Huge talons, curved for tearing, extended from the tips of the three huge fingers on each hand as the yellow eyes fixed on Jack. The lower half of its huge shark-like head seemed to split as the jaw opened to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth. It uncoiled its legs and slithered toward the front of the cage.

  Along with the instinctive revulsion, the memories surged back: the cargo hold full of their dark shapes and glowing eyes, the unearthly chant, the disappearances, the deaths . . .

  Jack backed up a step. Two. Behind him he heard the crowd Oooh and Aaah as it pressed forward for a better look. He took still another step back until he could feel their excited breaths on his neck. They didn’t know what one of these things could do, didn’t know their power, their near indestructibility. Otherwise they’d be pressing the other way.

  Jack felt his heart kick up its already rising tempo when he noticed how the creature’s lower lip was distorted by a wide scar. He knew this creature, this particular rakosh. Scar-lip. The one that had kidnapped Vicky, the one that had escaped Kusum’s ship and had almost got to Vicky on the shore. The one that had almost killed Jack. He ran a hand across his chest. Even through the fabric of his shirt he could feel the three long ridges that ran across his chest, souvenir scars from the creature’s talons.

  Scar-lip was alive.

  But how? How had it survived the blaze on the water? How had it wound up on Long Island in a traveling freak show?

  The creature was on its feet now, its talons encircling the iron bars, its yellow eyes burning into Jack. It knew him too.

  One of the workmen came by then, a beefy roustabout with a shaven head, thin lips, and the eyes of a snake. He carried a blunt elephant gaff and rapped it against the bars.

  “So you’re up, ay?” he said to the rakosh in a harsh voice. “Maybe you’ve finally learned your lesson.” He turned to the crowd. “Here he is ladies and gentleman, the one and only Man-Shark. The only one of his kind. He’s exclusively on display here at Ozymandias Oddities. Tell your friends, tell your enemies. You’ve never seen anything like him and never will anywhere else. Guaranteed.” He spotted Jack. “Here, you. Get behind the rope. This thing’s dangerous! See those claws? One swipe and you’d be sliced up like a tomato by a Ginsu knife! We don’t want to see our customers get sliced up.” His eyes said otherwise as he none too gently prodded Jack with the pole. “Back now.”

  Jack slipped back under the rope, never taking his eyes off Scar-lip. Now that it was up front in the light, he saw that the rakosh didn’t look well. Its skin was dull, and relatively pale, nothing like the shiny deep cobalt he remembered. It looked thin, almost wasted. It stared at Jack a moment longer, then it looked down. Its talons retracted, slipping back inside the fingertips, the arms dropped to its sides, the shoulders drooped, then it turned and shuffled back to the rear of the cage where it slumped again in the corner and hung its head.

  Drugged. That had to be the answer. They had to keep the rakosh tranquilized to keep it manageable. Even so, it didn’t look too healthy.

  But drugged or not, healthy or not, it had remembered Jack, recognized him. Which meant it could remember Vicky. And if it ever got free, it might come after Vicky again, to complete the task its dead master had set for it l
ast summer.

  The roustabout had begun banging on the rakoshi’s cage in a fury, screaming at it to get up and face the crowd. Jack turned and headed for the exit. He knew what had to be done.

  Scar-lip had to die.

  Friday

  Jack parked his Corvair at the edge of the Monroe meadows at around midnight and waited in the front seat for the circus to bed down for the night. Chilly. An autumn mist had formed, hugging the ground. No moon above, but plenty of stars. Enough light to get him where he wanted to go without a flashlight.

  At least Vicky wasn’t frightened anymore. Jack had hated lying to her, but seeing the relief he her eyes when he’d told her the rakosh she’d seen had really been a man in a rubber costume had made it seem like the right thing to do. He’d told her every last rakosh was dead. A lie, but only a temporary lie, just for a couple of hours. By morning it would be true.

  Things quieted down by one a.m. Jack waited until two, then went around to the Corvair’s front and removed a pair of gallon cans from the trunk. The gasoline sloshed heavily within as he strode across the uneven ground toward the hulking silhouette of the freak show tent. The performers’ and hands’ trailers stood off to the north by the big eighteen-wheel truck.

  No guards in sight. If any were about, they were probably concentrated around the menagerie area. Jack slipped under the canvas sidewall and listened. Quiet. A couple of incandescent bulbs had been left on, one hanging from the ceiling every thirty feet or so. Keeping to the shadows along the sidewall, Jack made his way toward Scar-lip’s cage.

  His plan was simple: flood the floor of the rakosh’s cage and douse the thing itself with the gas, strike a match, then head for the trailers shouting “Fire!” at the top of his lungs. He knew from experience that once a rakosh started to burn, it would be quickly consumed. He just hoped the performers and roustabouts would arrive with their extinguishers in time to keep the whole tent from going up. He didn’t like the plan, didn’t like endangering the tent or anybody nearby, but it was the most efficient and direct plan he could come up with on such short notice. He had to protect Vicky at any cost, and this was the only sure way he knew of killing a rakosh.

  He approached the cage warily from the blind end, then made a wide circle around to the front. Scar-lip was stretched out on the cage floor, sleeping, its right arm dangling through the bars. It opened its eyes as he neared. Their yellow was even duller than this afternoon. Its talons extended only part way as it made a half-hearted, almost perfunctory swipe in Jack’s direction. Then it closed its eyes and let the arm dangle again. It didn’t seem to have strength for anything more.

  Jack stopped and stared at the creature. And somehow he knew.

  It’s dying.

  He stood there a long time and watched Scar-lip doze in its cage. Was it sick or had it simply reached the end of its days? What was the life-span of a rakosh, anyway? He shifted the gas cans in his hands and realized he couldn’t do it. He could torch a vital, aggressive, healthy rakosh without a qualm, because he knew if positions were reversed it would tear off his head in a second and devour his remains. But there didn’t seem to be any question that Scar-lip would be history before too long. So what was the use? Why endanger the carny folk unnecessarily with a fire?

  Suddenly he heard voices down the midway. He ducked in the other direction, into the shadows.

  “I tell you, Hank,” said a voice that sounded familiar, “you should’ve seen the big wimp this afternoon. Something got it riled. It had the crowd six deep around its cage while it was up.”

  Jack peeked out and recognized the bald-headed roustabout who’d prodded him back behind the rope this afternoon. He had another man with him, taller, younger, but just as beefy, with a full head of sandy hair. He carried a bottle of what looked like bourbon while the bald one carried a six-foot iron bar, sharpened at one end. Neither of them was walking too steadily.

  “Maybe we taught it a good lesson last night, huh, Bondy?” said Hank.

  “Just lesson number one. The first of many. The first of many.”

  They stopped before the cage. Bondy took a swig from the bottle and handed it back to Hank.

  “Look at it,” Bondy said. “The blue wimp. Thinks it can just sit around all day and sleep all night. No way, babe! You got to earn your keep, wimp!” He took the sharp end of the iron bar and jabbed it at the rakosh. “Earn it!”

  The point pierced Scar-lip’s shoulder. The creature, moaned like a cow with laryngitis and rolled away. The bald guy kept jabbing at it, stabbing its back again and again while Hank stood by, grinning.

  Jack turned and crept off through the shadows. The two roustabouts had found the only other thing that could harm a rakosh—iron. Fire and iron. The creatures were impervious to everything else. As Jack moved away, he heard Hank’s voice rise over the tortured cries of the dying rakosh.

  “When’s it gonna be my turn, Bondy? Huh? When’s my turn?”

  The hoarse moans followed Jack out into the night. He stowed the cans back in the trunk, and got as far as opening the door car door. And then he knew he couldn’t leave.

  “Shit!” he said and pounded the roof of the Corvair. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  He slammed the door closed and ran back to the freak show tent, repeating the word all the way.

  No stealth this time. He ran directly to the section he’d just left, pulled up the sidewall, and charged inside. Bondy still had the iron pike—or maybe he had it back again. Jack stepped up beside him just as he was preparing for another jab at the trapped, huddled creature. He snatched the pike from his grasp.

  “That’s enough, asshole.”

  Bondy looked at him with a wide-eyed, shocked expression, his forehead wrinkling up to and beyond where his hairline should have been. Probably no one had talked to him that way in a long, long time.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Nobody you want to know right now. Maybe you should call it a night.”

  Bondy took a swing at Jack’s face. He telegraphed it by baring his teeth. Jack raised the rod between his face and the fist. Bondy screamed as his knuckles smashed against the metal, then did a knock-kneed walk in a circle with the hand jammed between his thighs, groaning in pain.

  Suddenly a pair of arms wrapped around Jack’s torso, trapping him in a fleshy vise.

  “I got him, Bondy!” Hank’s voice shouted from behind Jack’s left ear. “I got him!”

  Bondy stopped his dance, looked up, and grinned. As he charged, Jack rammed his head backward, smashing the back of his skull into Hank’s nose. Abruptly, he was free. He still held the iron bar, so he angled the blunt end toward Bondy and drove it hard into his solar plexus. The air whooshed out of him and he dropped to his knees with a groan, his face gray-green. Even his scalp looked sick.

  Jack glanced up and saw Scar-lip crouched at the front of the cage, gripping the bars, its yellow gaze flicking between him and the groaning Bondy, but lingering on Jack, as if it was trying to comprehend what he was doing, and why. Tiny rivulets of dark, almost black blood trailed down its skin.

  Jack flipped the pike a hundred and eighty degrees and pressed the point against Bondy’s chest.

  “What kind of noise am I going to hear when I poke you with this end?”

  Behind him Hank’s voice, very nasal now, started shouting.

  “Hey, Rube! Hey, Rube!”

  As Jack was trying to figure out just what that meant, he gave Bondy a poke with the pointed end—not enough to break the skin, but enough to scare him. He howled and fell back on the sawdust, screaming.

  “Don’t! Don’t!”

  Meanwhile, Hank had kept up his “Hey, Rube!” shouts. As Jack turned to shut him up, he found out what it meant.

  The tent was filling with carny folk. Lots of them, all running his way. In seconds he was surrounded. The workers he could handle, but the freaks, gathered in a crowd like this, in the murky light, in various states of dress, were almost terrifying. Jack was struck by the
degree and diversity of their deformities. And none of them looked too friendly.

  Hank was holding his bloody nose, wagging his finger at Jack.

  “Now you’re gonna get it! Now you’re gonna get it!”

  Bondy seemed to have a sudden infusion of courage. He hauled himself to his feet and started toward Jack.

  “You goddam sonova—”

  Jack rapped the end of the iron bar across the side of his bald head, staggering him. With an angry murmur, the circle of carny folk abruptly tightened. Jack whirled, spinning the pike around him.

  “Right,” he said. “Who’s next?”

  He hoped it was a convincing show. He didn’t know what else to do at the moment. The circle tightened further, slowly closing in on him like a noose. Jack searched for a weak spot, preparing to make a run for it. As a last resort, there was always the .45 caliber Semmerling strapped to his forearm.

  Suddenly a deep voice rose above the angry noise of the crowd.

  “Here, here! What’s going on now?”

  The carny folk quieted immediately, but not before Jack heard a few voices whisper about “the boss” and “Oz.” They parted ranks to make way for a tall, ungainly man, six three at least, lank dark hair, sallow complexioned, his pear-shaped body swathed in a huge silk robe embroidered with oriental designs. Although he looked doughy about the middle, the hands that protruded from his sleeves were thin and bony at the wrist. He stopped at the edge on the circle and took in the scene. His expression was slack but his eyes were bright, dark, cold, more alive than the rest of him. Those eyes finally settled on Jack.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  “Protecting your property,” Jack said, gambling.

  “Oh, really?” The smile was sour, almost cruel. “How magnanimous of you.” Abruptly his expression darkened. “Do not insult my intelligence, sir! I can call the police or we can deal with this in our own way.”