Spectacle

—from a September 4, 1986, broadcast of the Channel 10 Nightly News, Poplar Bluff, Missouri

Rommily (#u80d6457e-5754-592d-9551-55b238c164dc)

The oracle wandered down the midway, her gaze flitting from one brightly striped tent to the next, her fingers reaching for each soft scrap of silk and scratchy patch of sequins she passed.

She had not forgotten the cages and chains and blood. No matter how fractured her mind might be, she could never erase the pain and terror of that night in the rain or overcome a lifetime spent in a four-by-six animal pen.

But those were distant horrors now, relegated to the realm of nightmares.

The daylight was for dreaming.

As she meandered in the afternoon sun, her eyes were bright and focused. Her thoughts—typically tangled like a knotted cord—were blissfully calm, because there were no customers yet, and her fellow carnies knew better than to touch or speak to her. Those she considered friends smiled or waved when she passed, and those she cared little for paid her little attention.

Rommily listened to the shifters count out beats under the big top as they rehearsed an addition to their hoop-jumping, ball-balancing act. She heard the soft shuffle of hooves from behind a heavy canvas flap as the centaurs played their afternoon game of poker with Abraxas, the young human roustabout who’d taught them when to hit and when to stand.

As she passed the next tent, Rommily heard a familiar snort, and the sound triggered a warmth that spread beneath the surface of her skin. She veered from the midway with no conscious intent. Her feet followed instructions from her heart without consulting her brain, and a minute later, she stood behind the equine tent, where a single broad tree spread limbs in all directions, and with them, cool patches of shadow.

The minotaur sat in the shade on a wide, sturdy bench most men couldn’t have lifted. He stood when he saw Rommily, and the images that flashed behind her eyes were triggered not by premonition but by memory.

Strong hands tearing guilty flesh.

Blood spilled in the name of justice.

She said nothing as she crossed the patch of sparse grass separating them. Rommily only spoke in the grip of a vision, since that night in the rain, and without a human mouth, the bull couldn’t speak at all. Their connection had developed without the luxury of unnecessary words.

The minotaur’s arms spread as Rommily came closer. She reached out for him, her hand tiny and fragile against massive planes of muscle, her touch a delicate contrast to his raw power. The oracle trailed her fingers over the ridge of his human collarbone, just where dense, soft bovine fur began to grow. The top of her head didn’t reach his shoulder, and three of her standing side by side couldn’t have matched his width, yet she seemed to fit perfectly when she laid her head against his chest and wrapped her arms as far as they would go around his immense rib cage.

For several long minutes they stayed just like that, free from the burden of words. Safe from prying gazes.

When the pace of the day began to pick up—when footsteps fell hurriedly and voices began to sound tense—she reluctantly stepped back and squeezed the bull’s hand, then made her way to the fortune-telling tent all on her own.

Her older sister, Mirela, was already dressed in the white flouncy blouse and long, colorful skirt of a fortune-teller—an oracle cursed by fate with the genes of a “cryptid” and cursed by law with the chains of captivity.

Once, the outfit and chains had been authentic. Their internment in the traveling menagerie had been reality. Now the clothes were a costume—the wool pulled over the eyes of an audience that wanted to believe what it was seeing.

Metzger’s Menagerie—the institution that had once held her in bondage, half-starved and sometimes beaten where the bruises wouldn’t show—had become her salvation. It was now the veil shielding her from the prying eyes and cruel hands the rest of the world seemed so eager to wield.

Lala, Rommily’s younger sister, wore blue jeans and a red uniform shirt, which declared her name to be Louise. That was a lie Rommily found funny on some days and sad on others, but today she gave it little thought as she stepped behind the folding screen and exchanged her long white cotton dress for a blouse and skirt matching Mirela’s. She wasn’t fit to perform—not even the miracle of freedom could fix her shattered mind—but she had to wear the costume because the inability to control her visions meant she couldn’t pass for a human employee.

Dressed, she let Lala secure her with chains and shackles that didn’t really lock. Then when Mirela slid her paperback novel beneath the table and gave them a nod, Lala led Rommily out the tent onto the midway, where she would serve as a living advertisement for the wonder customers would find inside.

Overhead, static blared from a speaker mounted on a tall pole, then organ music poured forth, its playful notes dancing up and down the oracle’s spine, spinning around and around in her head like the stylized mermaid and unicorn seats on the carousel. The music was calming, some nights, because it signified a routine she knew well. But tonight the notes made her dizzy.

The oracle’s gaze lost focus. Her eyes closed as she chased the melody in her head, winding down mischievous paths and around dark corners. She didn’t notice when the carnival gates opened or the crowd appeared. She didn’t notice when Lala launched into her spiel.

The music felt odd tonight.

Laughter broke into the oracle’s thoughts and her eyes flew open as a father passed by the fortune-teller’s tent, tickling a toddler whose hair was fixed in blond pigtails.

“Cradle and all...” Rommily mumbled, her gaze glued to the child as terrifying images flickered deep in her mind. The crowd seemed to blur as her focus skipped from face to face, searching for another piece of a puzzle she would never be able to fully assemble.

Minutes later, a man and woman pushed a stroller down the midway. Rommily stared into it as it passed, and her eyes glazed into solid white orbs. “Out with the bathwater!” People turned toward the oracle and her petite female handler, intrigued by what they assumed to be part of the show. “Wednesday’s child! From the cradle to the grave!”

Parents pulled their children closer. The crowd began to murmur, and the whispered word reaping met Rommily’s ears.

Lala’s sales pitch ended in midsentence as she tried to shush her sister. But Rommily’s message—unclear as it was—could not go unheard.

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world!”

Delilah (#u80d6457e-5754-592d-9551-55b238c164dc)

Calliope music shrieked from the speakers just off the midway, its grating notes bouncing around my head like the ricochet of a whimsical bullet. Night after night, the iconic circus music managed to overwhelm all the other sounds of the menagerie, no matter how loud the cries of the barkers and buzz of the crowd grew.

Not that there was much of a crowd on the midway, after 10:00 p.m. The main event drew most of the customers into the big top for the last two hours of every evening, leaving only stragglers to knock down mermaid-shaped cutouts with water guns and toss rings onto an inflatable minotaur’s plastic horns. Or to visit the exhibits.

“Delilah!”

I turned toward the sound of my name to find Lala at her post in front of the fortune-teller’s tent. Folding my arms over my clipboard, I crossed the sawdust-strewn path toward her, sidestepping a little boy eating a melting ice-cream cone while his father threw darts at the balloon breasts of a cartoon-style siren. My head throbbed from the music and my feet ached from another eighteen-hour workday, but I put on a smile for Lala.

She was living her dream.

“How’d we do?” the youngest of the three oracles asked, crossing her arms over a red Metzger’s Menagerie polo. She’d filled out a bit with proper nutrition, since our coup of the menagerie, but the true source of her newfound confidence was the hours she spent watching television and listening to the radio while she worked, immersing herself in human culture. Despite her youth—she was barely nineteen—Lala had become one of our most self-assured and dependable liaisons with human society, and it certainly didn’t hurt that she looked completely human when she wasn’t in the grip of a vision.

“Um...” I checked the figure at the bottom of the form clipped to my clipboard. “Fifty-one thousand, two hundred seventy-two dollars.” Gross. In one night.

“That’s almost a thousand dollars more than last night.” Lala’s brown eyes shone in the light from a nearby pole. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s very good.” That was nearly twice what I’d made in a year as a bank teller, before I was “exposed” and sold into the menagerie. I should have been thrilled, especially considering that at $104 per ticket, admission wasn’t exactly affordable for the nine-to-fivers and minimum wagers who made up most of our customer base. Yet people kept paying night after night, in town after tiny, rural town.

“We’ll be near Tucson in a couple of days, right? I know we have bills and things, but do we have enough?” Her wide-eyed optimism made me feel guilty for being the bearer of bad news.

“Lala, we don’t have any. The money’s spent before we even make it.”

“What? All of it?” Unshed tears seem to magnify her eyes. “But we’re going to be within a few miles of Gael’s son.”

Like most of us, Lala got invested in every cryptid we tried to buy from the other menageries, preserves and labs that owned them. But this one was personal for her. She was the one who’d found the berserker’s son, in a vision.

“We have to buy him, Delilah. That’s the whole point of this, right?” She spread her arms to take in the entire menagerie, and our perilous, secret possession of it. “So pay something late. We only need twelve thousand dollars.”

Right after we’d taken over the menagerie, I would have paid it in a heartbeat to free one of our fellow cryptids from captivity. In fact, I’d done just that, before I had a handle on the menagerie’s finances. Before I’d realized how dire our financial situation really was.

I’d handled tens of thousands of dollars in cash nearly every night since we took over the menagerie, but the vast majority of it went to paying our operating costs. Taxes. Licenses and permits in every single town. Fairground rental fees. Inspections. Food. Fuel. Maintenance. And insurance. That was the big one. Insurance alone cost Metzger’s Menagerie more than a million a year. And we were only getting off that easily because Rudolph Metzger hadn’t reported most of our recent “incidents” to the insurance company—some, because the old man was trying to cut corners, and some because he was no longer in a position of authority at the menagerie.

We’d shipped him south of the border in one of his own menagerie cages, as a peace offering to the marid sultan, whose only daughter had died during our revolt.

If the insurance company knew about everything Metzger had covered up, our coup of the menagerie would have been exposed long ago, not because a customer saw through our masquerade, but because of simple, stupid bankruptcy.

Even so, we sat on the verge of that very catastrophe on a nightly basis.