When she had finished dusting all four of their plates and wiping an imagined spill off the narrow counter that served as their kitchen, she looked back to the bed where her daughter slept. Adeline’s eyes were closed, her chest rising and falling in a steady motion. Annie smiled in exhaustion and relief. At last.
The wagon had two doors, one at the front and one at the rear, although the door at the front was really more of a glorified hatch, intended for use only if she needed to lunge out and grab control of a runaway horse. She opened it, letting the night air in, and hung a lantern on the hook at the front. Any roustabout who looked that way would see the light and know its meaning: “unmanned wagon, driver out.” If the wheels started to drift or the horses tried to balk, someone would be there to pull things back on track.
Roping the wagons together for night travel came with risks—if something happened to one of the leaders, the whole circus could be compromised—but it was essential if they wanted to maintain the illusion of privacy between them. Not every wagon could be equipped with a driver capable of staying up all night, and even if they could have been, not everyone was happy to share their living space. Life at the circus meant having someone in your back pocket at all times. Any scraps of solitude that could be stolen were important.
And no one wanted to share a wagon with Annie and Adeline. Delly was too quiet for the younger women, the dancers and the aerialists and the made-up fortune tellers who really sold the chance to glance at their powdered bosoms through the magnifying lens of a crystal ball. She could come up on them like a ghost, like the accident that had stolen her voice had taken her footsteps with it, and scare them right out of their youth. She made the older women sad. They remembered their own children as laughing, idealized sprites, creatures that had been too good to stay, and knowing that she would never give her own mother that pleasure broke their hearts. As for the unattached men, well …
Even if Annie had been so determined not to be a burden as to allow one of them to share her wagon, Mr. Blackstone would never have been willing to stand for it. He was a gentleman at heart, which was a dangerous thing to be in a place like this one.
Annie took her cloak from its hook by the back door, slung it around her shoulders, and stepped outside.
There was an art to dismounting from a moving wagon. The steps could be extended only when the train had stopped; otherwise, there was a chance the friction from the ground could rip them right off their hinges, damaging the wood and requiring surprisingly extensive repairs. Annie waited on the lip that served as the wagon’s “porch” until she could feel the rocking of the road in her knees—only a few seconds, a dramatic contrast to her first years with the Blackstone Circus—and then stepped off, as fearless as a high diver plunging into her pool.
Her toes hit the ground first, followed by her heels, which made impact at the moment her knees bent. To an observer, it looked like a very short curtsey. Then she was upright again, heading briskly for the next wagon in the train.
This one was larger than the wagon Annie shared with Adeline, fancier, covered in gingerbread curlycue nonsense that had to be polished for at least an hour before a show—but when it was polished nice and proper, how it shone in the sun! Half the take for an afternoon could be determined by how brightly the trim was shining that day. The sides were painted with larger-than-life advertisements for the wagon’s contents, telling anyone who chanced to look their way that they could see! The Terrifying Swamp Beast! They could thrill! To the Ferocious Man-Eating Fish! They could even, if they liked, gaze in awe! At the Fearsome Tiger, Master of the East!
The freak show wagons rode behind this one, and many was the night Annie had spent among them, massaging sore muscles, tending to sprained backs, and most difficult of all, salving wounded feelings, which were slower to heal than wounded bodies. Thankfully, tonight, all the wagons rode dark and quiet, with their windows shuttered and lanterns hung to signal that everyone aboard was already off to dreamland. Her nursing duties were done for the night. Now was the time for her to do the rest of her duty.
Annie walked around to the back of the wagon that held their traveling caravan of oddities, unhooked the door, and hoisted herself up with a practiced hand, vanishing into the musk-scented darkness.
Chapter Two
The wagon of oddities was never lit when there wasn’t a person present. It would have been a waste of good wax, and a fire hazard, and besides, some of Annie’s “pets” didn’t much care for light. They could stand it—anything that couldn’t handle a little candlelight wasn’t going to display too well in the daytime—but they preferred the comfortable security of the dark that they’d been born to. Rustling and hissing filled the wagon as she lit the lantern next to the door, chasing some of the shadows back into the corners where they belonged.
“Now, now,” she chided, in the tone she’d used for Adeline when the girl was younger. “There’s no need to make such a fuss. I’m just here to make sure that all of you are secure. Once I know you’re fresh and fine, I’ll leave you alone until morning.” Adeline would be deep in dreamland by then, far from the concerns of the flesh, and Annie would be able to slip into her own bunk, surrendering the weight of the day to blissful unconsciousness.
The sun would rise far too soon for her liking, and another day would begin. Best to get her duties over with quickly.
It wasn’t as if the wagon of oddities was a good place to linger. There was no one with the show more familiar with it than she, not even Mr. Blackstone, who was technically the owner of the wagon and everything that it contained. He disliked the wagon, disliked the way the shadows seemed to weigh down the corners until they had become something more concrete than simple darkness, something lingering and terrible. He disliked the smell of it, animal and rank and oddly unnatural, for all that the bulk of it came from the bodies of the creatures kept there. They would never have chosen to cohabitate in the wild; would have torn each other to pieces if given the opportunity, filling their bellies with the flesh of the things that were currently their neighbors. A zoo like this, a smell like this, could never have existed in the natural world.
The fish came first. Two great tanks of them, kept on opposite sides of the wagon, to prevent opportunistic attempts at predation. The larger tank was iron-banded, with a padlock holding the lid in place. That didn’t mean Annie—or anyone with sense—trusted its occupants not to find a way to gnaw through the chain.
They were small creatures, at most five inches in length, with red bodies that always looked as if they had been dipped in blood that had then somehow failed to wash off in the water. Their mouths bristled with the jagged points of their teeth. When Annie had assisted Karina, the circus taxidermist, in preparing a few of the smaller specimens for outside display, she had been horrified to discover that those teeth didn’t fit neatly together the way a human’s did, or even slide seamlessly into holes in the creatures’ jaws, like a crocodile’s. No, they jutted out at all angles, making it impossible for the fish to feed without biting themselves, which no doubt only enraged them further.
The man who’d sold them to her called them “nibblers.” It was a coy name for creatures that really should have been called something more akin to “devourers.” She supposed it was a statement on the world they lived in that the names more befitting the toothy terrors had to be reserved for things even larger and more horrific.
The nibblers tracked her with their eyes and with tiny adjustments of their terrible bodies as she walked to the front of the wagon. There was never any doubt as to whether they were paying attention: when something warm and fleshy was nearby, the nibblers were nothing but attention. They were the most attentive creatures in the world.
“You’re next,” she said reproachfully. “And don’t gnash your teeth at me, you dreadful things. You can’t bite through glass.” Of that, she was reasonably sure. Had they been equipped to chew through glass, she would have long since been bones, even if she was the last meal they
would ever have. Nibblers, thankfully, could not breathe air any more than any other fish. Had they been amphibious, she was quite sure they would have eaten the entire circus long since, and died gasping but content.
The other tank was filled by the single hulking form of an albino river catfish. The big cat’ shifted in the water as Annie approached, whiskers quivering, watching her with oddly soulful eyes. Sometimes she thought the catfish was really more of an aquatic puppy, a dog that had somehow been forced into the wrong body.
“Good evening, Oscar,” she said gravely, picking up the jar that contained his food. The circus orphans gathered nightcrawlers for him every morning and evening, digging up the fat, slick worms and wiping them mostly clean before dropping them in pilfered dishes at the back of the oddities wagon. Annie didn’t mind the worms themselves, but if she didn’t consolidate them into the jar, they had a nasty tendency to slither into all corners of the place, dying and drying up like leathery threads.
(Townies were oddly horrified when they stumbled across the dead, dried-out worms—oddly because they were in the wagon to see terrible things, all the horrors and wonders of the unclaimed West. After beholding a feasting nibbler or a loop of bloodwire wrapping itself tight around the body of a captive squirrel, why should a worm hold any mystery? But somehow that little mundane reminder of the natural world was more than the sensibilities of some paying customers could handle, leading to Mr. Blackstone ordering her to keep the worms under control. Really. Annie had been a townie for most of her life before running away to join the circus, and yet sometimes she felt as if she would never understand them.)
The cat’ stirred in the water, beginning to rise from his place in the thin band of muck along the bottom. They couldn’t give the poor old boy as much mud as he wanted; it kicked up too much mess, blocking him from view, and quite countering the point of having a catfish of his size and coloration. If people couldn’t see him, they wouldn’t pay to see him, and if they didn’t pay to see him, he’d wind up on the grill before the silt had settled.
“Yes, yes, I see you,” said Annie. She tapped the surface of the water three times with her index finger. Oscar accelerated, rising to the top of the tank in a glorious sweep of open fins and creamy flesh. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear the gasps and awed exclamations of the townies, many of whom had never seen a proper cat’, as far as they were from the mysterious Mississippi. Even the most squeamish among them were often willing to pay a penny for the privilege of feeding him a live, wriggling worm—the same worms that would send them fleeing when dead and dried up on the floor.
Deftly, she extricated a nightcrawler from the jar and dangled it over the surface. Oscar stuck his mouth out of the water and slurped the worm daintily from her fingers, making it disappear.
“Good boy,” she said, and repeated the trick three more times before dropping a handful of worms into the tank for him to chase down and devour. He found them all with remarkable speed, given his poor eyesight and small catfish brain. Then, after nosing about in the silt for one last morsel, he settled back down, apparently content.
Oscar always amazed people with his “tricks.” Most folks figured fish couldn’t be trained, and maybe they couldn’t—he was never going to go fetching any sticks or jumping through any hoops. But fish could learn, and Oscar knew that humans meant food and safety. Had known, in fact, since he was just a tiny thing, lurking around the edges of the pond, coming out to eat only when human fishermen were there to frighten away the bigger fish, who would have seen his unusual coloration as a sign of weakness. Albinos were easy targets in the wild, which made them even rarer than they would otherwise have been.
Annie turned to look at the nibblers. They were still watching her. “I hate you,” she informed them.
Fish couldn’t talk. That would have been silly. Sailors who claimed to have heard fish speaking were clearly delusional from too much time spent at sea. But caring for the nibblers had convinced her of one thing: fish could hate. Fish could hate very, very well.
Carefully, Annie pulled on the welder’s gloves that hung next to the tank and unlocked the padlock on the first hatch. The nibblers became more active. She opened the cold box next, withdrawing a skinned goat shank. There were some in the circus who grumbled about how well the fish were fed, given how often roustabouts and handworkers went to bed with empty stomachs. Mr. Blackstone’s method of dealing with the complainers was to bring them to watch at feeding time.
“That,” he would say, as the nibblers stripped their supper to the bone in seconds, “is what they’re like when they’ve been fed recently. Can you imagine if we ever let them get hungry?”
That was usually enough to silence the complaints for a few weeks, until hunger overwhelmed common sense once more. What he didn’t seem to realize—and Annie couldn’t make him understand—was that the nibblers were always hungry. Give them a steak and they would want a cow; give them a cow and they would want the whole damn herd. Whatever cruel God had seen fit to fill America’s rivers with such horrors had not seen fit to also give them the capacity to be satiated.
“If you leap, I will leave you,” she said, hoping, as she often did, that the fish would somehow learn to understand; that they would see the logic in muzzling their hunger for human flesh long enough to let her feed them the dead, cold things that they deserved. She knew her hope was pointless. That didn’t stop it from kindling in her breast every time she had to perform this least-favored of chores.
The nibblers shifted in the tank, eyes always following her, jaws beginning to gnash. Little lines of blood colored the water around them, exciting the swarm more. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to encounter a school of them in the wild, where she had heard they could number in the hundreds. Imagine! It was a wonder anything survived within a hundred miles of the rivers. They should have been long abandoned, surrendered to the hunger that never died.
Two deadbolts secured the metal plate directly above the water. Annie hooked the end of a sharp metal chain through the goat, wrapping the chain twice around her hand, and pulled the deadbolts free. Speed was of the essence now. Saying a silent prayer to whatever gods might be watching, she yanked the plate back and dropped the meat into the water, taking a hasty step back.
Luck was with her: one more night when she would not die in the course of keeping herself employed and keeping her daughter alive. Only a few of the nibblers jetted toward the surface, and they withdrew without leaping once they realized that she was out of range. The rest of the school had already closed around the shank, and the few who had been willing to attempt going after her were forced to fight their way through the thrashing bodies in order to get their terrible teeth on the prize. The goat shank vanished, first beneath the press of bodies, and then behind a veil of bubbles as the wildly eating nibblers churned the water into an impenetrable veil.
The carnage lasted only a few seconds before the nibblers were swimming back to the glass, fixing their terrible eyes on her once more. The shank bone, freed from its fleshy confines, drifted lazily down to the bottom of the tank to join the graveyard forming there.
Annie kept a wary eye on the nibblers as she pulled the chain and hook free. Occasionally, the dreadful things would attempt to hitch a ride with the assemblage, forcing her to get the tongs. She couldn’t let them die, much as she might have liked to. Whatever nibblers required to breed, it wasn’t present in the tank; if they all died off, she’d be left without an attraction, and the children adored the nibblers. Many of the adults, as well. When the show was truly short on funds, Mr. Blackstone would occasionally ask a few of the rougher men from the crew to host “private shows” for locals, wherein they fed live rabbits, kicking and screaming, into the tanks.
Annie was never present for that. Nothing could have muzzled the screams of the poor rabbits.
Quickly, she used a fireplace poker to shove the plate back into place before locking the nibbler tank, checking twice to be sure that
everything was secure.
The rest of the wagon’s horrors—oddities, oddities; they must always be called by the proper name, even when she was only speaking to her own heart, lest she slip and use the wrong name in the presence of a paying customer—were easier to care for. Some of them only required feeding every few weeks, like the various serpents, the great spiders, and the bloodwire, which was still wrapped tight and content around its latest opossum. Unlike the nibblers, it had no trouble growing; someone needed to take the shears to it again soon, or else it was going to overgrow its tank.
Finally, she walked to the very back of the wagon and unlocked the kennel that waited there. Its occupant made a discontented grumbling sound, like a train engine trying and failing to fire.
“Hush now,” said Annie, dropping to her hands and knees and crawling, quite indecorously, into the dark.
Vast yellow eyes opened a few inches above her head, reflecting the light from the lanterns in ghost-flicker luminescence. It would have been unnerving, had it not been so familiar. Annie held her hand out toward the eyes. A moment later, a tongue the size of a lady’s handkerchief rasped across her palm in rough greeting.
“Yes, hello,” said Annie, crawling farther inside, until she bumped against the lynx’s side. She turned over then, rolling onto her back and resting her head on the great cat’s back, reaching up with both hands to scratch under her chin. The purring intensified. “Oh, you silly mush. You silly, silly mush. Did you think you’d been forgotten?”
Lacking words, the lynx simply purred on. Annie closed her eyes, letting the sound comfort her.
When she had fled her life to come to the circus—which had not, to be quite honest, been her original intent; her only target had been “away,” which was a terrible goal for a woman who knew nothing of the wilds, running for her life with an infant strapped to her chest—she had been able to take very little. Her jewelry, most of which had long since been sold or melted down to ease them through the lean times; her mother’s silver brush set, which she had since allowed to grow dark with tarnish, in the hopes of discouraging thieves; her daughter. Even her name had been left behind, buried and now virtually forgotten, to make her trail harder to follow.