“Step right up! Ladies and gentlemen, our display is not for the faint of heart, but for the price of one copper penny—one single coin!—you can see the wonders of the modern world spread out before your eyes. Have you heard the stories of the American West? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I assure you that they pale before the reality. No refunds in case of fainting or fleeing in terror! Test your bravery, stretch your mind, one copper penny—”
The barker’s cry went on and on as the crowd gathered outside the wagon of oddities. Inside, Annie moved quickly between exhibits, checking that each of them was ready for the public.
Only the nibblers had been fed. They became aggressive when hungry—more aggressive than they already were—and could potentially rush the wall of their tank. Annie didn’t believe they could break the glass. That didn’t mean she was going to press her luck in front of townies, especially townies who might well come back for another look at her wagon’s many wonders. The nice thing about a crowd was the way it rushed itself along. On a slow day, a person might pay their penny and spend an hour slowly exploring the oddities, seeing them each in detail, getting their fill. They’d have no cause to come back. On a busy day, everyone was rushed through by the person behind them, and some folks would come back three, four, even half a dozen times before they felt as if they’d seen everything there was to see. It was a blessing for her coffers, and for the circus as a whole.
(The wagon of oddities and the freak show were not the only revenue-generating exhibits. The contortionist, the dancing girls, the mentalist, and the magicians all made their share of profit, and it all rolled back into the circus proper, one way or another. But the oddities made the most money for the least investment and, more, were unique enough to make a lasting impression on the people who saw them. Someone who had seen the oddities in one town was likely to come and see them again in the next, if only to reassure themselves that yes, those things existed. Yes, those things were real.)
The barker was winding his pitch to a close. Annie looked across the wagon to Adeline, who stood motionless next to the exit, her hand on the latch.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll see you later tonight.”
Adeline nodded and opened the door, vanishing into the afternoon air. Annie smoothed her hands along the front of her dress, removing the wrinkles, and walked to the entrance, picking up her coin pot before opening the door.
The crowd outside was not the largest she had ever seen, but it was still large enough to be striking. Annie smiled as mysteriously as she could, trying to play the benefactress of beasts, and held out her pot.
“A penny buys you passage,” she said. “Who walks this way first?”
“I do,” said a barrel-chested young man, earning himself cheers and applause from his fellows. He swaggered forward, dropping a penny into the pot. Annie stepped aside, letting him enter.
Which will it be? she wondered. The nibblers? The snakes? The spiders—
He froze only a foot or so past her. Unable to resist, she glanced over her shoulder to see what had transfixed him.
Many of the cages in the wagon of oddities had been repurposed from other things. The tallest enclosure had once been used for a parrot owned by one of the sleight-of-hand operators, a great gold-and-red thing imported from some exotic land. It had spoken with a voice like a man, and had been halfway to being an oddity itself, before it had sickened and died for reasons unknown. Parrots were not suited to the harsh realities of the West. But the cage was good wrought iron, and once the bird had no longer needed it, Annie had claimed it, knowing it would be occupied again in short order.
Its new occupant was a mockery of the human form, two feet high and made entirely of green leaves, like corn husks twisted together by an unkind hand. Its head was a leering pumpkin with deep-set eyes that burned like coals. It grasped the bars of its cage with two-fingered corn husk “hands,” tugging itself up against the metal. Those burning eyes were fixed on the townie man, and its mouth was working silently, shaping unheard obscenities.
“The man who sold it to me called it a ‘corn stalker,’” said Annie. “They walk the fields in Oklahoma and Nebraska, looking for a place to lay their roots. Don’t go too close, good sir. It might well seek to plant its roots in you.”
It was impossible to keep those outside the wagon from hearing her words. They surged forward, eager to pay their pennies and see what had frightened one of the bravest men in town. Annie took as many as she could before beckoning the barker forward to handle the rest and retreating into the wagon to answer questions and keep an eye on the patrons.
She was explaining bloodwire to a wide-eyed little girl when there was a snarl from the back of the wagon. Quick as a blink, she whirled and shoved her way back there to find two little boys standing outside Tranquility’s cage. One of them had a stick guiltily held behind his back.
“Hey!” he protested, as Annie snatched it away.
“Am I to assume that you were prodding at this poor cat?” she demanded, waving the stick in front of him like a switch. His eyes tracked it, waiting for it to descend. “She never did a thing to you. Why should you want to hurt her?”
“It was just lying there,” said the boy. “I just wanted it to do something.”
“You never sleep? Does your mother come into the room at night and jab you with a stick to see what you’ll do?” Annie waved the stick again.
Tranquility had risen at the sound of her mistress’s voice, turning in her cage and pressing her face against the bars. Seeing the stick in Annie’s hand, she quite reasonably assumed that it was intended for her to play with, and stuck one vast paw between the bars, wrapping it gently around Annie’s calf and pulling her closer to the cage. She made a rumbling noise, not quite a growl and not quite a purr, expressing her interest.
The boys, who were not accustomed to being this close to large cats, yelled in dismay and stumbled backward, flinging their arms around each other in their terror.
Annie bent and gave the stick to Tranquility, who promptly bit it in half. The two boys fled the wagon. Annie smiled. Sometimes the easiest solutions were the pointiest ones.
She moved through the wagon, answering questions about the oddities, asking people not to touch things they didn’t understand, and nudging small children away from the snake tanks. All the serpents were housed behind thick glass; not even the largest of them had the necessary strength to break free. But snakes were not the cleverest of creatures. When they felt threatened they would strike, and she had watched rattlesnakes break their teeth against their enclosures often enough to feel protective of even these slithering members of her entourage. They had their own quiet beauty, as long as one steered clear of their fangs. They deserved the same respect that was afforded to everything else.
A man stood transfixed in front of the tank of terrantulas, staring at the skull-shaped markings on their abdomens. Annie stepped up next to him and said mildly, “These specimens were collected in New Mexico by a man who had seen them devour an entire wagon train. I started with a dozen of them, only to discover that when unfed, they will fall upon their siblings. These five are all that remain. If you return tonight, there will be a private show for adults only, where you may watch them eat.”
Privately, Annie couldn’t imagine wanting to watch the terrantulas eat. They swarmed over their prey, first pumping it full of caustic venom, then dissolving it with their powerful digestive juices. The spiders were too aggressive to allow her to clean their tank, but it didn’t matter much; by the time they finished eating, only bones remained, and those were so damaged by their acidic juices that they quickly broke down and dissolved, adding to the white “sand” that lined the enclosure. A very small hole, no bigger than the tip of a bullet, was drilled into one corner of the glass; by uncorking it, she could bleed off the “sand” whenever necessary, leaving a trail of bone dust scattered across the continent, while her chamber of horrors remained blessedly intact.
So many of the oddities required that kind of careful compromise. Feeding them, keeping them healthy and whole … sometimes it felt like a form of blasphemy. These weren’t things that deserved to roam the earth. They needed to be buried somewhere they would never be found, never be brought back into the light. Keeping them alive was wrong.
But living monsters brought in more coins than dead ones did, and who was she to judge? There were people who would call Tranquility a monster, with her sharp claws and taste for raw meat. There were people who would call Adeline a monster, citing her silence as proof of some deeper defect. There were even people who would call Annie a monster, for no honest woman would have fled her husband as she had done. Monstrosity was in the eye of the beholder, and while the oddities would have gladly devoured this entire town, given half the chance, they were never going to have that chance. They were captive. They were contained.
The man transfixed by the terrantulas turned to look at her, almost desperately. “They have skulls on their backs,” he said. “You paint them there?”
Please, said his tone. Please, tell me you painted them there; please, tell me this is some kind of a hoax that I just don’t understand. I won’t be angry. I won’t even ask for my money back. Just lie to me, and all will be forgiven.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to paint on the backs of these spiders,” she said. “They’re vicious things, and they don’t forgive people who interfere with them. No, this is as Nature made them, and whatever her reasons, I’m sure that they were good ones. It’s best not to look too long, sir. People have been known to start seeing the faces of their beloved dead in those skulls, and the nightmares that follow are nothing I would wish on my worst enemy.” It was a lie, of course, but a believable one, under the circumstances. She didn’t like to eject people from the wagon—those who’d been thrown out were less likely to pay for the opportunity to come back again—and yet she had been operating it for long enough to recognize the signs of a breakdown.
Men always thought their wives were fainting flowers, and true, more women than men had fainted within the confines of the wagon of oddities, but when it came to true confusion and dismay, nothing could top the anger of a man who had seen his own mortality reflected in a captive monster’s eyes. Women danced with death every time they loved their men, knowing that a bad pregnancy could take them from the world in an instant. Men … they hunted and they fought and they did their manly things, and yes, those things were dangerous, often by their own choice. That was the key word: choice. A man could choose whether to draw his gun or stay safe at home. A woman faced her greatest dangers in the place where she lived.
After watching a child choke on their own breath when the fevers came, few women found much to fear in monsters like Annie’s. All the oddities in the world couldn’t hold a candle to the dangers of the home.
“Ah,” said the man in a faint voice, and turned away.
He would be back. Annie knew enough about human nature to be absolutely sure of that. The ones who were the most distressed by some member or other of her menagerie were always the ones who came back when the lights were down, like they could face their fears and thus conquer them forever.
She could have told them a thing or two about facing fears. About the power that fear could have, no matter how many times it was stared down. But fear—seemingly safe, seemingly contained—was much of what kept the pennies dropping into the pot, and so she said nothing. Food on the table was more important than honesty.
The rest of the afternoon passed quickly. Show days always did. Once word got out about the contents of her wagon, the crowds were steady. She saw the same faces three and four times as they came back with friends, now content to play the role of the world-wise explorer, parroting back the same things she’d said to them on their first trip through. She hid her smiles as she hovered nearby, tidying things, straightening shelves, always listening, always making sure that the things that were being said were close enough to true that they wouldn’t turn dangerous.
(And there were dangerous rumors that could be spread about her creatures; there were always dangerous rumors. One town had somehow gotten it into their heads that eating the flesh of a nibbler would cure disease, as if the vicious, bony little fish were a secret panacea placed in the rivers of America for the brave and the desperate. She hadn’t caught on quickly enough. That stop had cost her three nibblers, and cost a boy with an ailing father his left hand, and the circus had been forced to leave so quickly that for a while there had been a question whether or not they would be able to keep all the wagons. Now she listened like a hawk, and when words like those were spoken, haltingly, for the first time, she was there to ensure that there would not be a second.)
The ebb and flow of the crowd told her what was happening outside. When the men vanished and the women came through like bright birds, the dancing girls were performing—and the women without the men were something to see! In the company of husbands, brothers, or suitors they were timid things, swooning behind their hands, clinging to the arms of their menfolk like they could no longer stand on their own. When they walked through in the company of other women, they were bold as anything, staring into the tanks with an intensity that would no doubt have frightened their menfolk.
“I kill bigger things than this in the privy at least once a week,” sniffed one of them, looking at a pit wasp with disdain.
“I think I’ve eaten these,” said another, looking at the corn stalker.
Annie hid her smile behind her hand and said nothing. She was privileged, as the somehow sexless keeper of the wagon, to see people as they were when not observed. It had taught her more about the true nature of humanity than she ever would have thought to see, back when she’d been a cosseted society wife. As lessons went, there were worse to take to heart.
For reasons of propriety and not being accused of wrongdoing, children were allowed only when in the company of a parent. Despite this, a surprising number of parents left their children in the wagon when they moved on, and sunset found her chasing the last trio of boys out, shooing them off to find their mothers.
The sky was the color of slowly drying blood, and the moon hung suspended in the middle of it all, like a clot of curdled milk. Annie paused at the back door, looking up and frowning to herself. That moon …
Some moons were kind and some moons were cruel, and superstitious as it might be, she couldn’t stop herself thinking about them in those terms. This moon, though. This moon was cold, like it was standing in impartial judgment over everything it saw. It made her miss the vast, cream-colored desert moons, which might be harsh but at least seemed to somehow care what happened to the people who lived and loved and died beneath their all-seeing eyes.
All moons were faces of the same moon. She knew enough about the sky to know that. And yet it was difficult not to look at this moon and shiver, for she felt as if she’d never seen it before.
The show was winding to a pause around her. It would spin back up as the night grew later, when the men returned for more ribald entertainments, and the women returned for closer looks at things that would have been scandalous by daylight, and everyone returned to see the oddities eat. In the meantime, the circus could take a breath, and eat.
Annie closed the back door, turning the bolt before heading to the front. The barker currently on duty was Martin, the boy who’d gone to the woods to bring them back a deer for the previous night’s supper. He was leaning against the wheel, trying not to look like boredom was crushing the life from his body.
“I’m going to close up for an hour, check on Delly and get myself something to eat,” she said. “If you’d like to get something for yourself—”
“I’ll see you in an hour,” said Martin, already straightening and starting to leg it away into the twilight.
Annie smiled to herself. Everyone with the show knew that Martin was stepping out with Sophia, and that the two would probably be married in the spring, assuming a baby didn’t force their hands before then. They were a charming pair, and she wished them well. Everyone did, so far as she was aware. There were jealousies and petty betrayals within the show—they were all only human, after all—but love was love, and it was a pleasure to see.
Carefully, she stepped out onto the wagon steps, closing and locking the door behind her. The oddities were weapons, in their own ways, and they were to be treated as such when the circus was stopped: unless she or Adeline were present, the doors were never to be left unlocked. Many of the things she cared for would die if they were released; the nibblers would choke on the air, the corn stalker would freeze in these unfriendly climes. But others would survive, at least long enough to take the slow and the foolish with them to Hell. An unlocked door on a wagon such as this was an invitation to an early grave.
The moon was cold and so was the evening, feeling more like early winter than early fall. Annie drew her shawl tight around her shoulders as she walked toward the boneyard. Roustabouts and barkers waved in her direction and she nodded back, not stopping or slowing. She hadn’t seen her daughter since the show had opened. She was consumed with a sudden strong need to gather Adeline in her arms and cover her face with kisses until she squirmed and tried to break free. Motherhood was a long trek from the coast of childhood to the territory of independence, and while she had traveled some of that distance, she was in no hurry to finish the journey.
The door to their shared wagon was open. The lights were out inside. Annie paused, frowning. Adeline rarely chose to go to sleep early, and when she did, she almost never remembered to extinguish the lights before taking her medicine.
“Delly?” she called, trying to tell herself that the sudden dread circling her heart was only foolishness, brought on by too many hours in the company of her oddities.
Nothing moved inside the wagon.
Annie climbed the steps and peered inside, searching the pooled shadows for a flash of pale hair, or the shape of a little girl curled beneath a coverlet. No such signs presented themselves. Adeline was not there.
Well. That didn’t necessarily mean anything was wrong. Adeline was as strong-willed and stubborn as her mother, and on show days, she would sometimes run from tent to tent for hours at a time, peeking at things she wasn’t meant to see for years yet, taking advantage of the fact that few of the barkers ever wanted to chase the gentle, silent girl away. Barring that, she might be in the mess tent, or playing with the circus orphans out behind the boneyard. There were so many options. There was no cause for concern.
Adeline was not in the mess tent. Half the circus orphans were, and when she asked them if they’d seen her daughter they shook their heads and answered with shy “no”s, their eyes still mainly on their meals. Most of them were wary around parents, as if they had been treated so poorly by their own that they could not trust anyone else’s.
Adeline was not out back. Nor was she in the other show wagons, nor peeking at the dancing girls. Adeline was gone.
Half an hour later, when she had exhausted every option, and a few more beside, Annie felt that there was every cause for concern in the world. She stumbled toward the big tent, heart hammering against her ribs, trying to keep her face composed. Showing distress in front of townies simply wasn’t done. It muddied things and could cut into profits. And while she remembered all those things, it was difficult to find it in herself to care.
Mr. Blackstone would be in the tent. He would be able to tell her that she was being silly, that Adeline’s father had not managed to somehow track them down and snatch her away while Annie was distracted. He would be able to fix this.
The boys who had been in the wagon earlier, prodding Tranquility with sticks, had joined another group of boys and were near the show tent, snickering and kicking something back and forth on the ground in front of them. Annie slowed, eyes widening. Then she charged toward the boys, catching their leader by the ear and yanking.
“Ow!” he howled. “Let me go!”
“Where did you get that?” she demanded, pointing at the object on the ground. It was a hide ball, battered and patched many times, until it was difficult to tell its original color. She gave his ear a vicious twist. “Where?”
“From a little dummy who wanted to play with us,” said one of the other boys, his mouth running ahead of his brains. His eyes went wide when she turned on him, his friend’s ear still clamped between her fingers. “I mean, there was … this girl, she said that we could…”
“Where is she?” demanded Annie.
“We said she could have her ball back if she went in the woods and brought back a pinecone we could kick around!” simpered the third boy. “Please, miss, we didn’t mean any harm!”
Annie gave the lead boy’s ear one more hard tweak, causing him to wail, before letting him go and snatching the ball up off the ground. “All of you, get out of my sight,” she hissed.
“I’m telling!” shouted the first boy, clapping a hand over his injured ear. “I’m telling!”
“Please,” she said. “I look forward to telling your parents what you did to my daughter.”
The boys, who remembered her as the mistress of monsters, exchanged a glance and fled. Annie watched them go, helpless. Then she turned her eyes toward the trees.
Adeline was out there somewhere.
She needed to bring her home.