Menagerie

The mesh was a recent requirement, after a twelve-year-old had lost her right hand to an irritable troll in a carnival out West somewhere, a few years back.

Shelley oohed and aahed over the chimera, a beast with the body and claws of a lion, two heads—one lion, one goat—and a snake for a tail. “Delilah, look how thick and smooth his fur is!” she cried, her nose inches from the side of the cage. I gently tugged her back by one arm. Anything with claws and venom should be appreciated from at least two feet away. “So glossy!”

But when the creature turned to pace four steps in the other direction—the full length of its cramped quarters—I noticed that the fur on the goat head’s side was matted and dirty. Obviously that half didn’t self-groom.

“Here, kitty, kitty!” Shelley called, and the snake growing in place of the beast’s tail hissed at her.

“He’s not a kitty, Shell,” Brandon said. “He’s a ferocious beast capable of tearing you apart with three different jaws at once.”

“He’s not a he.” I pointed at a sign attached with twists of wire to the bars on one end of the cage car. “Her name is Cleo. She’s eighty-six years old, as of last spring,” I said, still reading from the plaque. “Born in the wild well before both the reaping and the repeal of the Sanctuary Act, and still in her prime today.” I stepped back for a better look. “Poor thing. By the time she dies, she’ll have spent three-quarters of her life in a cage.”

Rick rolled his eyes. “They’re animals, Delilah. They don’t even know where they are.”

“We’re all animals. From the taxonomy kingdom Animalia. And you don’t know what she knows or feels. Have some respect. She’s your elder.”

Rick laughed as if I’d made a joke. He tried to put one arm around me and when I pulled away from him, I tripped over a rock and had to grab one of the cage’s bars to keep from falling. The heavy cage rocked just a little, and the chimera twisted toward me faster than I would have thought something with three heads could move. The snake hissed and the lion head roared.

I froze, intuitively trying not to trigger any further predatory instinct, but Shelley screeched and jumped back.

Rick laughed at her. Brandon pulled me away from the cage and didn’t let go even after I’d regained my balance, my heart still racing.

“Don’t touch the exhibits,” a deep voice growled, and we turned to find a large man in a bright red baseball cap standing near the end of the chimera cage. His red polo shirt bore the Metzger’s logo and the name embroidered over his heart read Gallagher. His hair was thick and curly beneath his cap and his eyes were dark gray. “Unless you want to lose a lot of blood.”

“I tripped.” In the glare from the setting sun, I noticed several old scars on his face and his forearms, and I wondered how many of those had come from beasts he was in charge of. And how many of them he deserved.

“Cleo’s in an iron cage, surrounded by steel mesh,” Rick said. “What’s she going to do, roar until our ears bleed?”

The man tugged the bill of his red cap down, shading more of his strong features. “Only a fool believes his eyes over all other senses.”

Shelley laughed out loud while Rick fumed, and when I turned back for another glimpse of the large man in the red hat, he was gone.

Shelley and I dragged the guys toward the next cage: Panthera leo aeetus. Commonly known as a griffin.

Rick and Brandon were fascinated by the griffins, both perched on dead tree branches bolted to the ends of their massive aviary on wheels. They had the hindquarters of a lion and the majestic head, wings, and front claws of an eagle.

An eagle on the physical scale of a lion.

I’d seen them on television and studied them in school, but I’d had no appreciation for their size until I stood in front of them. They must have weighed at least five hundred pounds each.

Brandon shouted at one, unrebuked by another large, gruff handler, and was rewarded when the griffin suddenly threw his enormous wings out and flapped, as if he’d dive at us. We all gasped and backpedaled. The griffin pulled his dive up short at the last second, and I noticed that a patch on his right wing, along the top ridge, was bare of feathers at exactly the spot his wing would have hit the bars, if he hadn’t stopped.

The griffin made a horrible avian screech and I covered both my ears, but when he settled on a branch closer to us, still riled up from being teased, I realized that his sharp eagle’s beak and incredible wingspan were far less intimidating than his feet, a lethal cross between a lion’s claws and a bird’s talons.

They were huge. And sharp. I noticed a dried chunk of raw meat wedged between his first and second digits.

My heart ached for him. The griffin was obviously meant to soar the skies and stalk the plains in wide-open freedom. None of which he would get in the menagerie. Yes, griffins could be dangerous, but so could bears and sharks and alligators, yet we didn’t round them all up and throw them into cages.

After the griffins came the phoenix. Shelley was disappointed when it refused to burst into flames, then rise from its own ashes for her personal amusement, even though the signs wired to its cage said the poor thing wasn’t due for a “rebirth” for nearly another month. I thought it was beautiful, even without the flames. The phoenix had a long graceful swan-like neck with plumage in vibrant graduating shades of red, yellow, and orange. Its broad sweeping tail would have made any peacock jealous.

After the bestiary, we skipped the “Natural Oddities” section, which promised us trolls, ogres, goblins, and other assorted humanoid creatures of legend. Brandon led the way toward the “Human Hybrids” section, where the sign at the entrance promised us “bizarre and fascinating combinations of man and beast.”

“Come forward, come forward!” the uniformed man at the tent entrance called, waving us closer with both white-gloved hands. “Metzger’s guarantees you’ve never seen a spectacle like this, no matter what other shows you’ve attended. No one else on earth has such an extensive collection of grotesque mergers of human and animal flesh as you’ll find in this very tent. Wolf and man, horse and man, fish and man, bird and woman...” He winked at Rick. “We’ve got it all! And don’t forget to take a peek at our world-famous minotaur! You won’t find another like him anywhere else in the continental U.S.!”

“It sounds really freaky,” Shelley said.

“That it is, that it is.” The talker bowed deeply, top hat in hand. “But you’ve got these lucky gentlemen to keep you and your friend safe.” He gave the guys another faux-confidential wink, and I almost laughed out loud. Brandon got nervous when he heard coyotes howl at night.

The man in the top hat glanced at our bracelets, then held back a canvas flap with a practiced flourish.

“Seriously, what’s it like in there?” Shelley asked before Rick could push his way inside.

The carny shrugged with an evasive smile. “Some people love it. Gives others the willies. But what I can tell you is that you can’t truly know who you are in here—” he laid one gloved hand over his red sequined vest “—until you’ve been through there.” He pushed the tent flap open wider.

Brandon, Shelley, and Rick stared into the darkness.

I stepped inside.

“Shock and grief echo across the United States this morning with the news that more than one million children died overnight, most reportedly killed in their sleep. Government officials and residents alike watch, stunned, as the reports continue to pour in, raising the death toll by several thousand per hour...”

—As reported by anchor Brian Richards on

U.S. Morning News, August 24, 1986

Delilah (#ulink_bc5b6fce-6054-5d70-8349-9a343575b3e8)

My ears roared with my own pulse as my friends followed me through the low entrance into the soaring tent, where a circle of faux-vintage wagon cages surrounded a bright red circus ring. The ring was empty except for a tall stool in the center, dramatically illuminated by a stark spotlight. Unoccupied bleachers lined the shadowy perimeter of the space, set up for a show to come later that night.

The farm scent was much less noticeable in the hybrid tent, where all the exhibits were at least part human, but there was yet more hay beneath our feet and the prevailing ambient noise was still the whisper of paws against hard surfaces and the occasional clomp of hooves.

Like the wagons in the bestiary, those in the hybrid tent had solid steel—or iron?—end panels, complete with massive, heavy-looking couplings with which they could be connected to the other cars. In theory. However, the rust on the hitches made me doubt that they were ever hooked to anything for very long.

Though we couldn’t see inside the cars with their end panels facing us, we could see into the wagons across the ring, where vaguely humanoid beings paced, slouched, or sat in the corners of their cages, wearily trying to ignore their audience.

A woman in a red sequined leotard and red-trimmed black top hat stepped forward when we got to the entrance of the ring, defined by padded crimson ropes strung between two shiny metal posts. “Welcome to the human hybrids tent, where every genetic atrocity you can imagine is on display to satisfy your curiosity!” Her name tag read Wendy, and she was cradling something in the crook of her left arm.

“Oh!” Shelley rushed toward the woman and the small bundle she held. “He doesn’t look so atrocious!”

Wendy gave her a slick, indulgent smile. “No, this little guy is damn near adorable.” She leaned into the light and I saw that she held an infant satyr, whose furry brown goat legs ended in tiny hooves. His chubby little belly and everything north of it was human, except the tiny horns growing from the sides of his skull.

I’d never seen anything cuter in my life.

“His mother just fed him, and I was about to take him back to the petting zoo.” Wendy twisted toward the circle of cages with hardly a glance at her young charge. “His mother’s the one at the back of—”

“Oh, can I hold him first?” Shelley asked, already reaching for the infant.

“I...um...” Wendy sputtered, obviously unsure how to answer. “I guess. Just for a second.” She laid the child in my best friend’s arms, while Rick and Brandon watched, dumbfounded.

“His fur tickles.” Shelley ran one finger down his fuzzy shin and over his hoof, but the child’s eyes never fluttered. He didn’t even seem to feel the touch.