“Only because you don’t want anything from me,” said Mr. Scratch. “I’ve yet to discover your weakness.”
“I haven’t any,” Baba Yaga insisted. “I am perfectly content.”
“And yet you left your forest to follow a child.”
“That’s merely boredom,” Baba Yaga told him. “Besides, I haven’t traveled in many years. One should travel. It’s broadening. So, you’re going to help the girl?”
“You’re changing the subject,” Mr. Scratch said.
“Only slightly,” said Baba Yaga. “Well, are you?”
“I’m going to vouch for her, yes,” Mr. Scratch said. “Spread the word of her abilities.”
“To what end?”
“Because it entertains me.”
Mr. Scratch turned and left the clearing, disappearing into the green of the woods without a farewell. Baba Yaga wasn’t offended. It was just his way. Also, she knew she had vexed him, if only slightly. She cackled lowly, lest he hear her.
“He’s lying,” she informed the Blithe family. “You can always tell when he’s lying. His left eye dims a bit. It’s why he never bests me at cards.”
The question on her mind was, why was he involving himself in this matter of the girl? There was something he wasn’t telling her. Well, there were many things he wasn’t telling her. But something about the girl in particular. She could understand him becoming mixed up in the game of life and death that the preacher was playing, in particular the spectator sport of watching people wrestle with their obsession over their own ends and finding ways to escape oblivion. He always enjoyed seeing them tremble in the face of their mortality.
But he could do that at any time without assistance. Death occurred with every tick and every tock. No, there was something more here that had caught his attention. Much as hers had been caught.
Well, she could wait for an answer. Truthfully, she wasn’t sure why she was so intrigued herself. So why should he know? Maybe they would find out together.
She bent down and fished in the pockets of Mr. Blithe, finding only a key and a small gold cross on a chain. The cross she tossed aside, but the key she put into her own pocket. You never knew when you might need to unlock a door.
N I N E T E E N
THE HOLY GOSPEL Caravan travelled mostly at night. Reverend Everyman preferred to arrive in a new location in the early hours of dawn, so that the big top was raised, flags flying, when the townspeople awoke. Of course, posters advertising the event had already been up for days (and sometimes weeks) ahead of time, and his arrival was anticipated. Still, he liked to create the illusion of a miracle, as if the revival had dropped out of heaven while the world slumbered.
This meant that Lily had to learn to sleep while the wagon in which she and her mother now resided was pulled along by a truck. Their beds were built into the sides, to prevent them from moving about, and it was rather like being in a boat, particularly when the road was more dirt than pavement. The first night, Lily dozed fitfully, jolting awake whenever the driver of the truck (a man named Lester, who during the day worked as one of the white-faced clowns) failed to avoid a rut or hole.
Fortunately, once in place, they generally stayed there for up to a week, and then the wagon seemed more like a home than a conveyance. Not that Lily saw all that much of it. Her time was mostly spent in the small tent that the Reverend had erected especially for her. Inside of it was a tall box, made of wood and painted white, that contained a small table and chair. A small hole was cut in the front, level with the tabletop, and another was cut in the wall to the right of the chair.
Lily entered the box through a door in the back. Seated at the table, she would wait until a hand was thrust through the opening. Then she would take it and perform her task, after which she would whisper what she saw into the hole to her right. Outside, his ear pressed to this same hole, was the Reverend. It was he who delivered the news to the querent.
Lily was not privy to these discussions. They took place elsewhere, out of her hearing. Her job was simply to report her visions. It was done in this way, the Reverend told her, to shield her from any unpleasant reactions on the part of the people who came to her. Also, he said, because he needed time to consult with God to determine what penance was necessary to change any unfortunate outcomes to which she bore witness.
Although separated from them by a wall, Lily still saw the faces of those who sat across from her. As she held their hands, she saw their vision-selves ravaged by disease and ill-living, broken by violence, and felled by their own hands. Much more rarely, she saw them pass peacefully. These deaths were a comfort compared to the others, which exhausted and saddened her.
She dutifully passed along each story to Everyman, relieved to have the responsibility for sharing them rest on his shoulders. Even so, the encounters drained her, and after the third or fourth in a day, she found it more and more taxing. She was thankful for the hours when no one came to her and she could open the door at the rear of the box and step out, although she still had to remain inside the tent. The Reverend had positioned a clown outside the entrance, and when anyone approached for a reading, he would honk a horn to alert her to the fact that she needed to secret herself inside the closet.
Twice she had been awakened in the middle of the night to provide her services. On the first occasion, the hand she took belonged to an elderly woman, surely already past her eightieth year. Lily had seen her strangled in her bed, her long hair used as a noose to choke the life from her. The second sitting had been for a man whose face was the first that Lily could not see in her vision, as it was covered by a sack made of coarse cloth. He too had a noose about his neck, although his was an ordinary rope that hung from a gallows inside a prison. The man’s hands were tied behind his back, and a group of spectators seated in chairs witnessed his death throes along with Lily.
Lily had no idea how the women and men who came to her were selected. Every day she sat in the big top, listening to Reverend Everyman preach, and yet he never spoke of her or invited his audience to partake of her services. Her tent was set on the edge of the larger carnival, away from the main alleyways, and no one would stumble upon it by accident. Those who came there had to do so purposefully. But how they knew she was there remained a mystery.
She did inquire. One night, after seeing the particularly odd and disturbing death of a man who leapt from the top of a building while engulfed in flames (the building itself was untouched), she asked the Reverend how those who visited the tent happened to be there. His answer — “The Lord guides them as he guides you” — was unsatisfying, but Lily did not press for further explanation.
Nor did she ask Everyman how much closer she herself was to salvation. She wondered sometimes what the worth of each vision was, how much debt she was paying off every time she took another hand in her own. She felt no different, but she was afraid to say so. Instead, she waited to be informed of her progress. The preacher seemed pleased with her, and she considered that a good sign. She decided that when she had done enough, he would let her know.
When she wasn’t in service, she was allowed to roam the carnival as she liked. However, the clowns frightened her, and it was difficult to walk amongst the crowds without accidentally touching someone and becoming trapped inside a vision, and so she largely confined herself to the big top, where she could sit in the stands and listen to Everyman preach.
She thought that perhaps she was starting to understand more about his god, if only a little. The preacher had given her another book, this one with words. He said they were the words of his god, and that she should read them and learn from them. In the quiet times during the day, and in her bed at night, she pored over the pages in search of meaning. Mostly, she didn’t find it. The stories were often confusing, sometimes boring, and she was left with more questions than answers. The Reverend had little time to answer these, and her mother told her to try harder to understand things for herself.
But sometimes, while reading th
e book, she caught fleeting glimpses of him. She discovered amongst its pages a group of poems, and returned to them again and again. Although their meaning was seldom any clearer than that of the other passages, she loved reading them. Occasionally, a line or two would speak to her.
He heals the brokenhearted
And binds up their wounds.
He counts the number of the stars;
He gives names to all of them.
She read these words while sitting atop the wagon in the middle of the night. Unable to sleep, she’d climbed up there with the book and a lantern. Once more she’d been saddened by not being able to find the constellations from the sky over her village. At this time of the year, she should have been able to see the Dancing Girl and the Stag with the Moon in His Horns right above her. But the girl was nowhere to be found, and the stag failed to appear. Then she’d opened the book to a random page and discovered those words.
The passage reminded her of Alex Henry and his hands that healed, and once more her heart broke. At the same time, she felt a glimmer of hope. Did Everyman’s god really name the stars in this world? And could he heal her heart? She needed to believe that he could. If there was no magic in this place (and she had yet to find any) then she required some other kind of assistance.
She read more from the book, looking for clues, but found nothing else. Still unready for sleep, however, she decided to walk through the carnival. At this hour, the clowns were abed, and even those visitors who remained following the evening service for further assistance from Everyman or one of his helpers would be long gone. Lily was now less afraid of who might see her and what they might think than she had been. Besides, the moon was bright and now she knew her way and how to get back to the safety of the wagon should she need to.
She walked slowly. With no destination in mind, she had no cause to hurry. Instead, she thought about Everyman’s god, and Alex Henry, and wondered what was happening at that moment in the village she had left behind. It was starting to seem so long ago, although she knew that it had been only a little more than three weeks. Three weeks since she had last heard the sea. Three weeks since she had slept in her little room at the top of the house. Three weeks since she had crossed the bridge, leaving her father behind.
Very few people were out. She saw only a handful of the women who came at night to clean up after the departed visitors. They trudged along with their sacks of refuse, paying no attention to anything but the discarded paper flowers and ant-covered tufts of cotton candy they collected from the grass. None of them took any notice of Lily.
Then, passing by a tent, she heard a noise like the buzzing of bees. Curious, she peeled back the flap and peered inside. In the middle of the tent was a table, and lying on it on her stomach was the daughter of the witch — the girl with the strange black symbols on her skin. Lily saw her twice a day in the Reverend’s shows, but had never seen her outside of the big top.
Four clowns held her in place, two of them pinning her arms and two holding her by the ankles. A fourth man, not a clown, stood over her. He held in his hand a device attached to a cord. It was this machine that emitted the buzzing sound.
“Hold her still,” the man instructed the clowns. “If she moves, the lines will be crooked.”
“What difference does it make?” asked one of the clowns as the struggling girl attempted to kick him. “Just mark her.”
The man with the device lowered it to the girl’s back and made several small movements. The girl cursed loudly and arched her back. The clowns laughed.
“Don’t you like being tickled?” one of them asked her.
“Go to hell!” the girl shouted, and spat.
The man working on her back pushed down roughly on her shoulders with one hand and continued his work with the other. Lily could see that he was leaving marks on her skin, thick black lines that looked very much like the other designs that were already there. The ones that Everyman said had been made by demons.
“Bastard!” the girl hissed.
Lily didn’t understand what was happening, but she could tell that the girl was in pain. The buzzing grew louder as the man continued to work on her. Now Lily saw blood running down the girl’s side.
“Keep still!” one of the clowns ordered. “Unless you want something to happen to your sister.”
The girl quieted instantly, although her breathing was still fierce.
“Ah,” said a clown. “That did the trick.”
“Where is she?” the girl asked, her voice filled with worry. “When can I see her?”
“When the Reverend decides that you’ve been a good girl,” one of the clowns said. “Have you been a good girl?”
The others laughed. One of the clowns touched the girl’s hair. “Have you been good?” he repeated.
The girl said nothing. Her back moved up and down, as if she were crying, but no words came out of her mouth. Still, she lay quietly as the man with the buzzing machine did his work.
Lily felt someone touch her. Instinctively, she moved away. Then, to her surprise, she realized that no vision of death was in her head. When she turned around, she saw Ash standing behind her.
“Come away from here,” he said.
He walked away. Lily, with a last look at the girl, followed after him.
“What are they doing to her?” she asked.
“Marking her,” said Ash.
“The Reverend says that she’s marked because of her mother’s sin,” said Lily. “He says those are the marks of a devil.”
“The only sin her mother committed was refusing to do what the preacher demanded,” Ash replied. “Those marks were made by man. There are worse things in this world than devils.”
Lily wanted to ask what the girl’s mother had refused, and what had become of her, but she was troubled by the way Ash spoke about Everyman, as if he were to blame for what she’d seen happening to the girl. And so she said instead, “The Reverend says that you and the card reader aren’t part of the Caravan.”
“We’re as much a part of it as he is and you are,” Ash said, not unkindly.
They walked until they came to the midway. The handful of pleasure rides that accompanied the Caravan and provided amusement for its visitors were shut down for the night, their generators silenced and their lights dimmed. So Lily was surprised when Ash approached the Wheel in the Sky and opened the door to the bottommost car. He gestured for Lily to get in.
She climbed in and sat down. Ash sat beside her. A moment later, gears turned somewhere in the ride’s innards and the wheel began to move, soundlessly lifting the car up. Lily gasped.
“How are you doing this?” she asked Ash.
“It’s machinery,” said Ash. “It wants to be useful. I simply ask it to do what it was made to do.”
The Wheel in the Sky was not terribly big. None of the rides were, as they had to be able to be transported from place to place. Nevertheless, it was the second tallest structure in the carnival. Only the big top rose higher in the sky. When the car in which Lily and Ash sat came to rest at the very top of the circle, it therefore looked out over the tops of the tents. Lily could see as far as the small group of wagons, where she had left her mother sleeping.
They sat, swinging gently in the night air. Then Ash spoke.
“Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”
“Who did the devil say that to?” Lily asked him.
“To the Reverend’s god,” said Ash. “It’s in the book he gave you.”
“I haven’t read all of it yet,” Lily admitted. “Why did he do that?”
“Pride,” Ash said. “He wanted to be adored above all things.”
Lily thought for a moment. “But didn’t this god create the world and everything in it?” she asked, remembering both what she had read and what she had heard the Reverend
say. “How was it the devil’s to give him?”
“A good question,” Ash told her. “You should ask it of the Reverend one of these days.”
Lily added it to the list of other questions she had yet to ask or have answered. Then she asked one of Ash. “Do you have a god in your world?”
“No,” said Ash. “We have a queen. A king too, but he’s of little consequence. He mainly acts as an escort at balls. And the kings don’t tend to last very long anyway.”
“Why is that?” Lily asked.
“The queen changes her mind,” said Ash.
“Are you afraid of her?”
“Me?” said Ash. “No. The worst that could be done to me has already been done. But those who still live in my world do. She has a habit of turning her disobedient subjects into hares, and she’s a fair shot with a bow.”
They sat in silence for a time. Then Ash said, “I can send you home. It would take a great effort to open the door, but I will do it if you like.”
Lily looked at him. His eyes were old tonight. “Why would you do that for me?”
“Because I know what it’s like to be taken away from your world,” he said.
“Can you not return to yours?” Lily asked him.
“Not unless the one I was exchanged for is brought back,” he told her. “And I suspect he’s long dead. As I said, the queen’s favor is fleeting. She probably tired of his blue eyes and flaxen hair before he was even weaned.”
“How long have you been gone?”
Ash shrugged. “A few days. A few hundred years. It’s all the same. Do you want me to help you go back?”
Lily considered the question. She did miss her home. And there were so many things she didn’t understand about the place she was in. At the same time, she still believed that Reverend Everyman and his god were her best hope of salvation. If she went home, the opportunity to rid herself of her curse might be lost forever.
“Thank you,” she said to Ash. “But I think I need to stay. For now.”
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