A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  And she wore the headpiece of a nun.

  She shone the beam in his face and he blinked.

  “Dear sweet Jesus!” she said. Her voice was hushed with awe. “You’re not dead yet? Even in this condition?”

  He opened his mouth to tell her what she no doubt already knew very well: that there were only certain ways the undead could succumb to true death, and a concussive blast from an explosion was not one of them. But his jaw wasn’t working right, and he had no voice.

  “So what are we going to do with you, Mr Vampire?” she said. “I can’t risk leaving you here for the sun to finish you—your friends might show up first and find a way to fix you up. Not that I can see how that’d be possible, but I wouldn’t put anything past you vipers.”

  What was she saying? What did she mean? What had happened to him?

  “If I had a good supply of holy water I could pour it over you, but I want to conserve what I’ve got.”

  She was quiet a moment, then she turned and walked off. Had she decided to leave him here? He hoped so. At least that way he had a chance.

  But if she wanted to kill him, why hadn’t she said anything about driving a stake through his heart?

  Gregor heard her coming back. She had yellow rubber gloves on her hands and a black plastic bag under her arm. She rested the flashlight on a broken timber, snapped the bag open, and reached for his face. He tried to cringe away but again, no response from his body. She grabbed him by his hair and ... lifted him. Vertigo spun him around as she looked him in the face.

  “You can still see, can’t you? Maybe you’d better take a look at yourself.”

  Vertigo again as she twisted his head around, and then he saw the hallway, or what was left of it. Mass destruction—shattered timbers, the stairs blown away, and ...

  Pieces of his body—his arms and legs torn and scattered, his torso twisted and eviscerated, his intestines stretched and torn. Gregor tried to shout out his shock, his horror, his disbelief, but he no longer had lungs.

  Vertigo again, worse than before, as she dropped his head into the black plastic bag.

  “What I’m going to do, Mr Vampire, is clean up as much of you as I can, and then I’m going to put you in a safe place, cool, dark, far away from the sun. Just the sort of place your kind likes.”

  His remaining hand was tossed into the bag and landed on his face. Then a foot, then an indescribably mutilated, unidentifiable organ, then more, and more, until what little light there was left was shut out and he was completely covered.

  What was she doing? What had she meant by “just the sort of place your kind likes”?

  And then the whole bag was moving, dragging across the floor, ripping as it caught on the debris.

  “Here you are, Mr Vampire,” she said. “Your new home.”

  And suddenly the bag was falling, rolling, tumbling down a set of stairs, tearing open as it went, disgorging its contents in the rough descent. More vertigo, the worst yet, as Gregor’s head tumbled free and bounced down the last three steps, rolled and then lay still with his left cheek against the cellar floor.

  The madwoman’s voice echoed down the stairwell. “Your kind is always bragging about how you’re immortal. Let’s see how you like your immortality now, Mr Vampire. I’ve got to find another house, so I won’t be around to see you any more, but truly I wish you a long, long immortality.”

  Gregor wished his lungs were attached so he could scream. Just once.

  Sister Carole trudged through the inky blackness along the centre of the road, towing her red wagon behind her. She’d loaded it with her Bible, her rosary, her holy water, the blasting caps, and other essentials.

  You’re looking for ANOTHER place? And I suppose you’ll be starting up this same awful sinfulness again, won’t you? When is it going to END, Carole? When are you going to STOP?

  “I’ll stop when they stop,” Sister Carole said aloud to the night.

  WINTER QUARTERS

  Okeechobee County, Florida

  “That’s a difficult offer to refuse,” Joseph Peabody said.

  The crusted bowl of his briar was warm against his palm as he struck a wooden match to it and befogged his immediate vicinity. Ashes sprinkled the latest issue of AB lying open on his lap. He eyed his visitor through the blue-white smoke.

  Jacob Prather’s son—Ozymandias. Weird name, that. Almost as weird as the fellow standing in front of him now. Well, Jake Prather hadn’t been too tightly stitched himself. Peabody had known him long ago when they were both with Taber & Sons mud show. Peabody had been assistant manager and Jake had had a gig in the sideshow—some sort of weird apparatus that didn’t do anything, just sat there and looked strange. Jake was a nice enough fellow, but he got decidedly weird after his son was born. Finally quit the circuit just about the time Peabody got the wherewithal to buy Taber’s failing show and rename it after himself.

  Peabody’s Traveling Circus—he’d match it up against any other two-tent mud show in the country for giving a family their money’s worth when they bought a ticket.

  Peabody never saw Jacob Prather again. And now, years later, here comes his son, back in the business.

  The circus has a way of getting into your blood.

  Ozymandias Prather looked nothing like his father. Jake had been a small, stoop-shouldered, bespectacled field mouse. His son was tall—-six-five, maybe. He didn’t stand, he loomed. Lank dark hair, parted on the side and plastered down; pale skin, lips so thin his mouth looked like a skin crease, and blue eyes as warm as a mausoleum. A funny-shaped body: his shoulders were narrow, his arms long and thin, yet he was barrel chested, with a broad but paunchless abdomen set upon wide hips. His head was normal-size but his torso made it look too small for his body. The overall effect distorted perspective. Looking straight at him made Peabody feel like he was standing in a hole looking up.

  “Why should you want to refuse?” Ozymandias Prather said in a deep voice that seemed to come from everywhere in the room but his lips.

  “A freak show . . . that sort of thing’s never been my style. You should know that. As a matter of fact, it’s out of style. ”

  “Gawking at the deformed is never out of style.” Bitterness there—a load of bitterness.

  “I don’t know, Ozymandias . . .”

  “Most people find it easier to call me Oz. You’ve seen my troupe, Mr. Peabody. If you don’t think they can turn the tip, then you’re not the showman I think you are.” “I’ve seen your troupe,” Peabody said, repressing a shiver. In all his sixty-six years he’d never seen such a collection of oddballs. “Where on earth did you find them?”

  The razor-thin lips curved upward at each end: a smile. Sort of.

  “Diligence hath its rewards. But that is irrelevant. An offer is on the table: cash up-front for a forty-percent interest in Peabody’s Traveling Circus. Your only concessions are adding my name to the logo and putting a few extra stops on the route card, but you retain control. A can’t-lose proposition for you.”

  “I don’t know about that. My people aren’t going to like it.” Peabody’s general manager, Tom Shuman, and manager, Dan Nolan, were up in arms about sharing the stops with a bunch of freaks. “We run a clean show. We’ve got a reputation—”

  “But you’re losing money and you’re almost broke. I’ve seen the balance sheets, Mr. Peabody. My troupe can bring in the extra crowds, the people who think high-wire acts and waltzing elephants and clowns and foot-juggling are passé. They’ll come to see us, but they’ll stay for your show, and they’ll buy our flukum and popcorn and balloons and T-shirts.”

  “I want no grift,” Peabody said emphatically, and he meant it. “No games, no monte, no prostitution.”

  He saw Oz stiffen. “I have never allowed that in my troupe. And I never will. We don’t need grift to turn a profit.”

  Peabody believed him. Something in his gut warned him away from this man, urged him to throw Ozymandias Prather out on his ass, but he sensed a puritanical streak i
n this oddball and believed he’d run a clean show. And the hard truth was, the show was looking Chapter Eleven in the eye. Ozymandias Prather was offering him a way out. And at least he’d still be in control.

  Reluctantly, he held out his hand. “You’ve got a deal, Oz.” They shook. Oz’s hand was cold but dry. “I’ll have my lawyer draw up the contract. By the way, do we have a name for this new conglomerate?”

  Oz rose and towered over him. His basso voice boomed.

  “The Peabody-Ozymandias Traveling Circus and Oddity Emporium.”

  “That’s quite a mouthful. By the way, how’s your father?”

  “Dad? He killed himself years ago.”

  Oz then stepped out the door, leaving Joseph Peabody alone in his chair, sucking on a dead pipe.

  Outside the trailer, Oz stood under the stars and closed his eyes a moment. He wanted to celebrate, guzzle champagne, and shout his elation. But there was work to do.

  As if on cue, a tall, lean figure separated itself from the shadows. An exquisitely handsome face with cold, cold eyes leaned into the light.

  “He accepted?” said Petergello in his silky voice.

  “Of course,” Oz said. “He had no choice.”

  “A lot of money.”

  “What will money mean if we’re successful?” Petergello nodded. “And so it begins.”

  “And so it ends,” Oz said. “For all of them. Drive me back and have the Beagles bring the players to the meeting tent”

  “Everybody?”

  “No. Just our kind.”

  George Swenson sat in his trailer trying out a new glue on his skin—he’d developed a rash from the old stuff—when the sudden pounding on his trailer door made him spill the glop all over his left arm.

  “Damn! What is it?”

  He heard a growl from the other side of the door and knew it was one of the Beagles. Daubing at the glue with a damp rag, he crossed to the door and wrapped his sticky arm around the doorknob. He hadn’t had a chance to replace it with a lever and it was damn hard to turn these knobs when you didn’t have fingers. Finally he twisted it far enough to slip the latch.

  One of the five Beagle Boys was outside, pointing across the clearing toward the meeting tent. George tried to figure out which one this was. It was almost impossible to tell. The Beagles were identical quints; five muscle-bound hulks, virtually neckless, with tiny ears, close-cropped hair, deep-set eyes and toothy grins. All were mute but managed to get across what they wanted you to know, even if they had to get rough to do it.

  “A meeting? All right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” The Beagle held up a meaty fist. The message was clear: Don’t forget, or else.

  “Yeah, sure,” George said, undulating an arm at him. “I’ll be there.” Then he slammed the door.

  George didn’t know what to make of Oz’s entourage. Some of them had been together for years, traveling the South and occasionally venturing up the East Coast. George was a newcomer, a “first-of May” in the lingo. Oz had come to him a couple of months ago at the very nadir of his twenty-two-year life—out of college due to lack of funds, out of work because no one wanted to hire a guy with boneless forearms that looked like tentacles—and offered him a job. Not a great job. In fact, it was the worst job imaginable—a sideshow freak. He glued flesh-colored rubber suction cups to the underside of his tapered, handless forearms and—presto!—he was—

  Octoman—The Human Octopus!

  Product of an Unholy Union

  Between Woman and Sea Monster!

  Yeah, right. His mother had never even seen an ocean and his father had been a car salesman. The closest George had ever been to a carnival before this was as a child when his mother would take him to the Taber & Sons show on its annual trip through Moberly, Missouri. She loved circuses and sideshows. She’d gone every year before he was born and saw no reason to stop after. He’d gawked at the bearded lady and pinheads and giants and dwarves, never dreaming that one day he would be a gawkee instead of a gawker.

  Dwarves, giants, bearded ladies, pinheads . . . they were the Rotary Club next to this troupe. Yet for all the sinister shapes and bitter, suspicious attitudes, George had felt an instant kinship with these . . . freaks. God, he hated that word, but there was no other name for them. They were freaks of nature. Accidents who didn’t belong, who had nowhere else to go, who were fit company for no one but each other.

  Luckily George wasn’t like them. He had a future. He was going to finish college, get his degree in computer science, and go on from there. He’d be so damn good at systems analysis no one would give a damn if he had no hands.

  He finished wiping off the glue and headed for the meeting tent. Something had been in the air about joining up with a mud show for a long summer tour. Maybe Oz had struck the deal.

  “It will be a long trip, brothers and sisters,” Oz said as he walked among the members of his troupe. “Long in distance and in days.”

  Half an hour ago they’d straggled in and seated themselves in a rough circle, and now they listened intently as he finished itemizing the mundane details of the coming tour and segued into the important part, the crucial part, the part they would have difficulty grasping and believing.

  “And perhaps it is good that we make a full circuit of this country—better yet if we could make a circuit of the globe—for it will allow us a chance to see it so that we can remember it as it was—if we care to. ”

  He let his gaze range over them as he allowed the words to sink in. All the important ones were here. The special ones, the ones like him. Carmella sat with Louella, Kysleen, and Emily, flashing sidelong glances at Lance who sat alone; as always, Virgie Bone sat alone too, not far from Haman who appeared to be staring at the closed tent flap; Herbert and Claude sat with Dub and Rattles, while Bowser occupied his usual place on Mr. Tane’s lap; Senorita Gato and Quinta Romero had seated themselves up front next to George Swenson. And of course there was Malaleik, dear, precious Malaleik, the key to all of Oz’s plans. Petergello hovered at the rear with the Beagle Boys, keeping them in line.

  The troupe. The freak show. People with green skin, white skin, furry skin, reptile hide, with no eyes, with extra eyes, extra digits, no digits, with wings, with visions, with no vision, with one face, with two faces, with every face. It was a gathering to give many an ogier the creeps for life, but to Oz they were beautiful. They were his kin. Brother and sister were not forms of address he took lightly. They were kin. For they shared a common parent, a third parent that had left an indelible imprint on their genes.

  The Otherness. Each had been touched by the Otherness.

  George Swenson looked up at him from under a furrowed brow and posed the question Oz had known someone would ask.

  “Remember it ‘as it was’?” he said. “I don’t get it.”

  “I shall explain,” Oz said. “But first I must tell you that I did not arrange this tour merely to make more money. We will do that, but the money is unimportant.” He watched the brothers and sisters nudge each other and mutter. He’d expected that. “What is important is the search. For while we are touring we will be searching for some important objects.”

  “Like a scavenger hunt?” said Dub’s frontface.

  “In a way, yes. But in this hunt there will be no single winner. If we are successful in this hunt, all of us will be winners.”

  “What will we win?” George said.

  “Justice. Understanding. Acceptance. Compensation. ”

  The expressions facing him—the readable ones—were frankly dubious.

  “I don’t get it,” said young Lance Whiting.

  “And you never have,” Oz said. “Justice, that is. None of you have. You’ve been shunned at best, and at worst you’ve been reviled, abandoned, beaten, and tortured. But never . . . understood. With your cooperation, this tour will change all that.”

  “Will it give me hands?” said George Swenson.

  “No,” Oz said. “You won’t need them.”

  �
��Will it give me eyes?” said Mr. Tane.

  “No. You won’t need them.”

  “Will it straighten my spine?” said Kysleen.

  “No. You won’t need a straight spine.”

  “Will it change this beak into a normal nose and mouth?” said Emily Gibbs Butterman, who toured as Mother Goose.

  “No. You won’t need them.”

  “Will it get me a keg of German beer?” said Dub’s backface.

  Everyone laughed.

  “No,” said Oz. “You won’t need beer.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Lance.

  “A change,” Oz said. “We have an opportunity to work a change upon the land. And the instrument of that change can be activated if we find all its components and reassemble them.”

  “A machine?” George said. “A machine is going to change the world?”

  Oz nodded. He’d known this was going to be a tough sell. He barely believed it himself. But he had to have their cooperation. He could not succeed without it.

  “Yes. When the machine called the Device is activated at the proper time in the proper place, it will, quite literally, change the world—change the way the world sees us, change the way the world sees itself.”

  He paused and let them mutter among themselves, then raised his voice.

  “You need not believe me. I realize that might be too much to ask. But I do ask that you trust me. As we make a circuit of the country I will from time to time ask one of you to venture into one of the towns we are passing through and retrieve one of the missing Pieces of the Device. You do not have to believe that it will change our place in the world for the better, all you have to know is that it is important to me and to those of your brothers and sisters who do believe.”

  Oz turned in a slow circle, eying each one in turn. “Have I ever lied to you?”

  He noted with satisfaction that every head was wagging slowly back and forth.

  “No. I do not lie.” He pointed to the outer world beyond the tent wall. “They lie to you. I do not. And I say to you now that the Device is monumentally important to all our lives. Is there any one of you who will not help collect its component parts as we travel?”